Video games have a distinct advantage over movies when it comes to capturing an audience. They're longer and often more engaging than most films, thus movie adaptations are always going to have a hard time telling the same story.

The recently released Tomb Raider is proof of this. The film follows Lara Croft on her first adventure as she searches for her father on the long lost island of Yamatai, where she finds herself caught in a conflict with the Order of Trinity, who threatens to end the world. There's a lot of clunky dialogue and an intense focus on action sequences rather than character development, which ultimately proves problematic since it effectively fails to include the essentials of the source material.

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The film proves to be more entertaining than its predecessor, and there are some fans who are ready to declare it the best video game film ever made... but that's really not saying much. Like every video game film, ever, it's still largely inferior to the video game it's based on.

So, why was it even made? Why does Hollywood still attempt to adapt video games to film? Considering what modern video games are like, it seems relatively pointless.

In past decades, films based on successful video games were warranted. The games drew players in, but they were highly unrealistic (just look at the polygons on 1996's Lara Croft), and though they tried, they just weren't able to offer the vivid action and intense thrills that a trip to the movie theater could provide. It made sense to make Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, because the film was able to add emotion and depth to the world around Lara Croft, who was essentially limited by technology to one facial expression. Angelina Jolie's action sequences also looked better than anything video games were capable of producing at the time, but that's simply not the case anymore.

Technology has advanced to the point where it's now difficult to discern a digitally produced cinematic clip from actual gameplay. Game developers make use of motion capture and relatively elaborate set pieces to help them construct different scenes so their games can offer an epic, cinematic experience with which audiences can interact. Because of this, video games are being taken far more seriously as an industry.

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It's why we're starting to see more prominent Hollywood figures lend both their voices and sometimes their likeness to mainstream games. Veteran actor Martin Sheen played a prominent role in the Mass Effect trilogy; Charles Dance lent his voice to CD Projekt Red's The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, Kit Harrington starred in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe starred in Beyond: Two Souls. The list goes on and on. Award winning film score composer Hans Zimmer even had a hand in composing the soundtrack for Assassin's Creed: Revelations. It's clear that the development of video games have reached the point at which they can be compared to large budget films.

So, again -- why continue to try to adapt them to film?

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Video games generally last dozens of hours (if they're any good), and in those hours, they're able to convey depth in their stories, their characters, even their settings at times. Most video games are created with a singular purpose in mind: To immerse the player in a fantasy world of some sort. That means constructing elaborate realities with complicated, engaging characters that films simply don't have the time for. That's the whole reason filmmakers still have to rely on tired tropes and old character archetypes, or worse, in an attempt to avoid those tropes, they throw in unwanted inventions and odd casting choices, which is how you end up with an adaptation like the infamous Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

While there's no real reason why Hollywood should continue to condense expansive stories and rich characters to try and adapt them to film, we can't argue that some level of demand doesn't exist. After all, fans love to fantasize about which famous actor should or could play a beloved video game character, and sometimes they express that desire loudly. But that doesn't mean anyone should be spending millions of dollars to turn those fantasies into reality, because the end result is always inferior to the source material, as every video game film ever has shown us.

Yet despite the poor track record of these adaptations, there are still plans to produce many, many more. Take the upcoming adaptations of Naughty Dog's Uncharted and Square Enix's Sleeping Dogs.

While relatively little attention has been brought to these films so far, we do know quite a bit about them. For example, the Uncharted film will feature Tom Holland as a young Nathan Drake, the focus of the film, since that's the only area of Drake's life the Uncharted series hasn't fully covered. Naughty Dog is involved with the film's production and from what the creative director, Neil Druckmann, has said, it sounds as though they may understand the fact that the games have already given people a cinematic experience that more than adequately explored Drake and the characters around him. That might be heartening, but we cannot forget that Tomb Raider also had the support of its developer, Square Enix, and so did Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed.

Sleeping Dogs is a strange case, simply because the video game itself did not present players with a wholly unique storyline. It's more or less the story about an undercover cop that gets too close to an enemy. There have been plenty of films like that, and this film adaptation of the game may just be making use of the name. It may just turn out to be a cop thriller of its own.

Time will tell if these upcoming adaptations break the video game movie curse. Chances are slim but here's hoping. If or when they fail, Hollywood should take a good hard look at the products of the video game industry and hopefully come to the realization video games do not need to be adapted to film... TV maybe, but that's a whole other discussion.