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The Orson Welles version of the isn't particularly close to the book either.
Personally, I love the book and had never heard it describes as snoozeville (it is pretty tight and moves along pretty well). It's well worth a read, particularly keeping in mind when it was written.
I actually liked the Spielberg version too, for a conversion into an action movie. My only two major problems are:
1) His son lives. That was just stupid.
2) The ending, like the rest of the movie needs to be updated. When the book was written, germ theory was still relatively new and it was easy to imagine it as a cutting edge issue that would be overlooked by an invading species. That just isn't true any more; I understand the meaning that the means of their defeat is supposed to have but it is no longer appropriate unless they also don't update the rest of the story.
It is kind of like if a similar story had been written shortly after the development of radio technology and so it was cool at the time that we defeated them because the aliens were unaware that broadcast communication was possible. Then in 2006 we made a movie where everything except this was updated. In 1900 aliens that don't know about germs is a reasonable and clever ending; in 2000 they're just stupid aliends.
Otherwise it was an intense movie. But read the book, it isn't as bad as you've heard.
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