Which Classic Video Game Adaptations Are Actually Worth Watching

For years, watching a video game movie meant accepting some pain. Hollywood spent decades turning beloved games into baffling scripts, rubbery monsters and films that seemed faintly embarrassed to be based on games at all.

That reputation has changed. With Sonic, Fallout, The Last of Us and a growing pile of adaptations proving there’s a real audience here, it’s a good time to look back at the older attempts and separate the genuinely entertaining from the ones best left on the cartridge shelf.

Mortal Kombat Still Knows Exactly What You Came For

Start with 1995’s Mortal Kombat, because subtlety was never going to win this fight.

Paul W.S. Anderson’s movie sends Liu Kang, Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade to a mysterious tournament where Earth’s fate will be decided through an impressive amount of kicking. Christopher Lambert plays thunder god Raiden with the relaxed energy of a man who wandered onto the wrong set and decided to stay.

Critics weren’t exactly throwing roses. But three decades later, the movie’s strengths are much clearer. It moves quickly, embraces the game’s ridiculous mythology and gives you recognizable characters actually doing recognizable Mortal Kombat things.

Then there’s the theme song.

The moment somebody screams “MORTAL KOMBAT!” over pounding techno, any serious critical objections become temporarily irrelevant. The soundtrack went platinum in the US, which tells you something about the cultural footprint this strange little movie managed to leave behind.

The effects have aged. The dialogue occasionally sounds like it escaped from a Saturday morning cartoon. None of that ruins it.

If you want a video game movie that understands fun matters more than respectability, this is still an easy recommendation.

Resident Evil Barely Resembles the Game, and That Helps

The 2002 Resident Evil movie made a decision that would get modern fan forums arguing for months: it largely ignored the characters from the games.

Instead, Milla Jovovich plays Alice, an original protagonist who wakes up with amnesia before entering the Hive, an underground Umbrella Corporation laboratory where a virus has turned the staff into zombies.

As a faithful adaptation, it’s shaky. As a lean early-2000s sci-fi horror movie, it works.

Director Paul W.S. Anderson, apparently determined to become the patron saint of watchable video game movies, borrows the games’ ingredients rather than copying their plots. You get Umbrella, zombies, creepy laboratories, questionable corporate science and one laser corridor that has probably remained in the memory of everyone who saw the film as a teenager.

The movie earned approximately $103 million worldwide and launched a film series that eventually ran for six Jovovich-led installments. That longevity makes more sense when you revisit the original. It’s fast, grimy and far less bloated than several of its sequels.

Just don’t go in expecting Resident Evil 2 with actors.

Tomb Raider Gave Us the Right Lara Croft

Some casting decisions require an explanation. Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft really doesn’t.

Released in 2001, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider arrived when Lara was already one of gaming’s most recognizable characters. Jolie gets the essentials immediately: Lara is confident, amused by danger and usually the smartest person in whichever ancient ruin she happens to be destroying.

The film around her is considerably messier.

There’s a mysterious artifact, the Illuminati, planetary alignment and enough ancient machinery to make an archaeologist quietly leave the cinema. The plot mostly exists to move Lara between action sequences.

But Jolie commits completely. That matters.

The film earned roughly $274 million worldwide, enough to produce 2003 sequel The Cradle of Life. Neither movie is especially sophisticated, but the first has the kind of glossy, excessive early-2000s adventure energy that has aged into something oddly charming.

For a more serious Lara, Alicia Vikander’s 2018 Tomb Raider is closer to the rebooted games. For pure movie-star Lara Croft, Jolie still owns the role.

Silent Hill Is Better Than Its Reputation

Here’s the pick that horror fans have spent years defending.

Christophe Gans’ 2006 Silent Hill follows Rose, played by Radha Mitchell, into the abandoned town while she searches for her daughter. What follows is fog, ash, sirens, grotesque creatures and the arrival of Pyramid Head, who looks every bit as unpleasant in live action as you’d hope.

The story gets tangled, especially once the film starts explaining its mythology. But visually, it understands Silent Hill better than most adaptations of its era understood their games.

That’s the important part.

Gans recreates the series’ industrial nightmare with real conviction, while composer Akira Yamaoka’s music from the games helps preserve the atmosphere. The result actually feels connected to the thing it’s adapting rather than wearing its title as marketing.

Its critical reception was rough, but the movie has developed a much warmer reputation among horror and gaming fans since 2006. If you’re willing to forgive clunky exposition for genuinely unsettling imagery, it deserves another look.

Why You Should Care

You don’t need childhood memories of PlayStations and arcade cabinets to enjoy these movies. The better adaptations work because each finds something useful in its source material, whether that’s Mortal Kombat’s shameless energy, Resident Evil’s claustrophobia or Silent Hill’s nightmare atmosphere.

And they make today’s adaptation boom more interesting. Pokémon Detective Pikachu became the first theatrically released video game movie to receive a Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score in 2019, while 2024’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 later reached 85% on the Tomatometer. The bar didn’t rise overnight.

What to Watch and Play Next

Watch Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019) next if you want to see the point where mainstream video game movies started becoming reliably decent. Its 68% Rotten Tomatoes score looks modest until you remember what came before it.

Then try Sonic the Hedgehog (2020). It’s bright, uncomplicated and powered by Jim Carrey behaving like someone told him 1994 never ended.

And if Silent Hill is the movie here that sticks with you, play Silent Hill 2 in either its original form or the 2024 remake. The film borrows heavily from the series’ imagery, but the game shows why that imagery became iconic in the first place.

The funny thing about the old “video game movie curse” is that it was never quite as absolute as people remember. You just had to know where to look.