Whatever the case, I thought that and the tripod emerging from the street made for a nicely strange and disorienting start for the movie (not to mention a damn cool effect). Much better than the cliche "giant alien ships coming down from the skies" thing once again.
It's cliché because it makes sense that aliens would attack from outside our planet, which is why it's used repeatedly. Having the tripods be buried underground for a million years, while perhaps cool and unique, doesn't make a damn bit of sense.
Who were the tripods meant to conquer when they were planted a million years ago?
Ground sloths?
Homo antecessor? Why were they placed in
North America when not even proto-humans lived here? Did the aliens see the future, and just not the part where they all die from an infection? Why not just try to inhabit Earth then when there would be a lush planet with untapped resources and no competing intelligent technological species in need of eradication? How did they know where future human population centers would be when they placed the tripods underground (since they were attacking cities immediately, not walking to them and giving advanced warning)? What are the odds of one being placed where it can come up right in the middle of an intersection in Bayonne, New Jersey? How were none of the countless tripods discovered through erosion, tectonic activity, human excavation/infrastructure building, or ground penetrating sensors?
The location of the tripods wouldn't have moved a large distance over the past million years, but certainly enough that the aliens would need homing beacons to so precisely target them as they did. Were those always on (in which case, why couldn't we detect some kind of EM emission?), or did they activate only when the crews were ready to be inserted? If they only activated right then, how do you target wormholes as you suggested above to those precise coordinates without knowing where they were first? You'd likely need a ship to hover over the general area until it triggered the homing beacon and then precise targeting with the whole lightning pod-inserting thingie could happen.
What kind of species fights with million year old technology? Were they in hibernation that whole time or are they really that technologically stagnant? How is it aliens who had that kind of tech so long ago can't detect microbes hostile to their physiology in our ecosystem?
I'll grant that there were some cool and creepy scenes if you turn your brain off and just enjoy the ride, but usually Spielberg is a bit beyond that kind of Michael Bay-level requirement (well, sometimes). The whole movie is composed of scenes crafted to look cool and be menacing that don't make an ounce of sense, like the heat rays that destroy everything but clothes, or the train that was incinerated by the beams that impart heat and force, yet still remains on the tracks.
