Colours of Fire is crowded with ideas: tribalism, fear-mongering, inherited violence, love as disruption, myth as social technology. Yet, the film treats these ideas more as aesthetic motifs than as dramatic engines.
By Joseph Jonathan
Colours of Fire arrived in Nigerian cinemas with an unusual kind of confidence. It was not just a film but a declaration; loudly marketed as an experiment in “Afrofusion”, heavy with visual effects, animation, and mythic iconography, and positioned as evidence of how far Nollywood’s technical capacity has expanded. From its opening frames, the film wants to be read not merely as a story, but as a milestone. And in many ways, it is. The question is whether that milestone marks narrative progress or simply technological accumulation.
Directed by Niyi Akinmolayan, Colours of Fire has grossed ₦134M at the box office, a modest return that belies the scale of its ambitions. But commercial performance is only part of the story here. What makes this film significant isn’t whether it succeeded or failed in conventional terms, but what it reveals about Nollywood’s current identity crisis: the tension between technical sophistication and narrative coherence, between the desire to be taken seriously on the global stage and the fundamental craft of telling a compelling story.
As someone who is no stranger to experimentation or technological risk-taking, Niyi Akinmolayan’s fixation on scale, technology, and visual ambition did not begin with Colours of Fire; it has defined his career from the outset.
Long before Nollywood’s current fascination with VFX and AI, Akinmolayan was already experimenting with the limits of what Nigerian cinema could look like, shaped by a background that straddles engineering, digital design, animation, and storytelling. His early work behind the scenes—as a graphics designer, animator, and visual effects artist—fed directly into Kajola (2010), a dystopian sci-fi film whose ambition far exceeded both its execution and its commercial reception.
Though widely criticised and financially unsuccessful, Kajola functioned as a provocation, expanding the industry’s visual imagination and emboldening later filmmakers to think beyond realism and constraint. Since then, Akinmolayan’s career has oscillated between commercial hits, public failures, and continued formal curiosity, with projects that consistently test new visual languages, genres, and production techniques. Colours of Fire, then, does not emerge from nowhere; it sits within a long-standing commitment to innovation, ambition, and risk, even when those risks don’t pay off cleanly.
Akinmolayan has stated explicitly that he believes filmmaking is not a predominantly artistic activity but rather a scientific one requiring calculations and technology infusion. He’s built Anthill Studios on a philosophy of “visual deliciousness” prioritising aesthetic appeal to the point where, in his own words, “no matter what anyone thinks about the story, it’s impossible to see an Anthill Studios film and not find it aesthetically pleasing”. This is directorial philosophy as a mission statement, a clear declaration of values and priorities.
Colours of Fire is the fullest expression of this philosophy to date. It’s also, ironically, the clearest evidence of its limitations.
At its heart, Colours of Fire tells a familiar story dressed in unfamiliar garments. In a fictional ancient world, two tribes—the Blue and the Red—exist in manufactured animosity, each convinced of the other’s monstrosity through inherited myths and deliberate fabrications. The Blue Tribe, masters of sacred blue magic called Elu, once ruled with harmony and prosperity. Blue was more than a colour; it was divine favour made visible, woven literally into fabric and daily life.
That balance shatters when red emerges as a colour tied through fearful rumours to blood, dark magic, and disorder. As the Red Tribe prospers, fear replaces admiration. Tales spread of a monstrous being, Agedengbe, attacking farmers during harvest. The Blue Tribe sends Akinbode (Uzor Arukwe), a warrior raised from childhood for this singular purpose: to slay the monster and restore order.
But when Akinbode reaches the Red Tribe’s territory, he finds no monster. He finds another community burdened by its own fears and prophecies. He finds Moremi (Osas Ighodaro), a woman prophesied to bring down Badero, son of Abifarin. She becomes the bridge between two worlds built on deception, and through her, Akinbode learns that the hatred between tribes is rooted not in reality but in myth, misinformation, and the lies that serve power.
It’s a compelling premise, allegorical enough to resonate beyond its specific cultural setting, specific enough to feel grounded in recognisable patterns of human conflict. The themes are rich: inherited hatred, the danger of tradition weaponised to silence truth, the way fear poisons reason, and the political stakes of forbidden love. This is material that could sustain a powerful, nuanced exploration of how communities construct and maintain their enemies. In execution, however, the film often feels less interested in developing this premise than in surrounding it with increasingly elaborate visual architecture.
Akinmolayan’s cinema has always been driven by design. His films privilege scale, movement, and visual coherence over psychological interiority. Characters often function as carriers of ideas rather than as fully articulated individuals, and Colours of Fire takes this tendency to its furthest extreme. The world is meticulously constructed: costumes signal hierarchy and ideology, colour operates as both aesthetic and political language, and the environment itself does much of the narrative labour. Long before the dialogue begins, the film tells us who holds power, who is feared, and who is marked as disposable.
This is where Colours of Fire is most effective. The film understands cinema as a visual medium first. Its best moments are largely wordless: ritual sequences, confrontations staged through movement rather than speech, images that linger long enough to communicate dread, longing, or menace. The sound design is dense and purposeful, filling emotional gaps the script often leaves unaddressed. The music, performed by Adam Songbird and Mr. Magick and composed by Oludamilola Adewale Aluko, doesn’t just accompany the scenes; it shapes them, creating a theatrical quality that elevates several sequences. Diegetic sound adds texture to the magical atmosphere, making the world feel inhabited and alive. There is a clear attempt to speak in images rather than exposition, and when the film commits to this approach, it briefly feels like a genuine expansion of Nollywood’s cinematic vocabulary.
But here’s where Akinmolayan’s philosophy begins to show its cracks: when spectacle becomes not just the method but the substance, when “visual deliciousness” is prioritised to the point where narrative becomes an afterthought rather than the foundation.
Colours of Fire’s central conflict, the rivalry between the Blue and Red tribes, is referenced more than dramatised. We’re told about villages suffering, about the terror Agedengbe has caused, about the deep roots of tribal hatred. But we rarely see these things unfold with the dramatic weight they require. Motivations remain frustratingly vague, character arcs lack depth, and the antagonist never fully asserts presence in ways that create genuine tension. The beast itself, Agedengbe, is described as this critical threat, but when it finally appears, it’s rendered through visual effects that feel more like a missed opportunity than a realised vision.
Just as often, the film retreats into over-explanation, underwritten dialogue, and narrative shortcuts that undermine its mythic ambitions. Revelations arrive without the groundwork required to make them resonate. The story moves forward, but it rarely deepens.
This imbalance — between visual ambition and narrative coherence — becomes the film’s defining tension. Colours of Fire is crowded with ideas: tribalism, fear-mongering, inherited violence, love as disruption, myth as social technology. Yet, the film treats these ideas more as aesthetic motifs than as dramatic engines. They decorate the world rather than shape the characters. As a result, the emotional core remains thin. We understand what the film wants to say, but we rarely feel it.
The reliance on visual effects exacerbates this problem. The film uses a combination of green screen, AI-generated visuals, and animation that creates what could be described as “tonal confusion”. Visual effects that initially complement the set design become increasingly inconsistent as the film progresses, shifting from enhancement to distraction.
While some sequences integrate seamlessly into the film’s texture, others feel conspicuously performative, calling attention to the technology itself rather than to what it enables narratively. Spectacle becomes an end rather than a means. Instead of extending the story, the effects often pause it, creating moments that are impressive but inert.
What the execution reveals is that throwing technology at a problem doesn’t solve it, sometimes it makes it worse. The AI elements aren’t too advanced for audiences to appreciate; they’re too obvious, too poorly integrated, too clearly a shortcut rather than a solution.
This is not a question of competence. Colours of Fire is competently made, sometimes impressively so. The issue is a priority. The film behaves as though technical advancement is, in itself, narrative progress — as though more tools automatically produce deeper stories. But cinema history suggests otherwise. Technology amplifies intention; it does not substitute for it.
What emerges, then, is a film that feels overbuilt and underwritten. The world is sturdy; the story is fragile. The infrastructure is robust; the emotional throughline is tentative. We are invited to marvel at the construction without being fully invited into the experience of those who inhabit it.
This tension reflects a broader moment in Nollywood. The film industry has spent decades being dismissed as low-budget, technically incompetent, not “real” cinema. It has fought for respect, for distribution, for the kind of attention Western film industries take for granted. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be seen as sophisticated, professional, world-class. As the industry pushes toward higher budgets, more sophisticated tools, and global cinematic legitimacy, innovation increasingly becomes synonymous with technical complexity. VFX, AI, animation, and expansive world-building are framed as proof of evolution.
But there’s a danger in confusing technical sophistication with cinematic maturity. Having access to VFX and AI doesn’t make a film better if those tools aren’t deployed in service of stronger storytelling. A gorgeous costume can’t save a poorly written character. Stunning cinematography can’t compensate for unclear motivations and unearned emotional beats.
Colours of Fire exemplifies this confusion. It reaches desperately for markers of “advanced” cinema—VFX, AI, animation, epic scale, elaborate production design—while neglecting the fundamentals that actually make cinema work. The result is a film that looks expensive but feels empty, that demonstrates technical capability while revealing narrative weakness.
If storytelling fundamentals — character psychology, narrative causality, emotional accumulation — are not evolving at the same pace, technical sophistication risks becoming ornamental. The film begins to resemble an exhibition rather than a conversation, a showcase rather than an inquiry. It wants to be taken seriously, but it does not always do the work that seriousness requires.
The performances reflect this uncertainty. Actors oscillate between heightened theatricality and muted restraint, often within the same scene.
Osas Ighodaro’s Moremi is the film’s strongest presence. She embodies a seductive, dangerous aura that aligns with the mythic tone, bringing physicality, controlled accent work, and genuine dance ability to the role. Her horn-shaped braids visually communicate both beauty and menace, and she commits fully to the character even when the script gives her repetitive romantic scenes that fail to deepen the relationship.
Ibrahim Chatta, as the oracle Baba Agba, is compelling, grounded by controlled delivery and convincing ritual presence. Gabriel Afolayan delivers emotional sincerity, though occasional excess appears in monologues—a tendency toward melodrama that the material seems to encourage rather than restrain. Uzor Arukwe as Akinbode is serviceable but restrained by a role that requires him to be largely reactive, the warrior whose training and certainty gradually dissolve as truth emerges.
The problem these actors face isn’t lack of talent or commitment. It’s that they’re working in a film where the character is subordinate to spectacle, where emotional arcs are less important than visual composition, where the screenplay provides moments to perform rather than fully realised people to inhabit.
Mercy Aigbe feels particularly disconnected from the ensemble, her line delivery occasionally rehearsed in ways that suggest she never quite found the character or the tone. But this speaks less to her limitations as an actor than to the film’s failure to establish a consistent direction. When different cast members seem to be performing in different registers, some reaching for mythic grandeur, others aiming for naturalism, a few playing broad comedy, that’s a directorial problem, not an acting problem.
None of this makes Colours of Fire a failure. On the contrary, it is one of the clearest expressions of where Nollywood currently is: ambitious, restless, technologically curious, and deeply anxious about relevance. The film wants to prove that Nigerian cinema can look global, feel expansive, and command spectacle. It succeeds in demonstrating capacity. What it struggles to demonstrate is control.
The danger is not that Nollywood is experimenting with technology. The danger is that experimentation becomes a substitute for storytelling discipline. That innovation becomes a checklist rather than a question. Those films begin to confuse surface complexity with depth.
Colours of Fire is most compelling not as a finished work, but as a diagnostic object. It reveals an industry in transition, one reaching outward faster than it is digging inward. It asks whether advancement is measured by shinier images or by more sophisticated narrative thinking. Whether cinema progress is cumulative or integrative.
The question that Colours of Fire forces us to confront is whether Nollywood is advancing or just accessorising; whether the accumulation of technical capabilities represents genuine development or just the acquisition of new tools that haven’t yet been integrated into coherent practice. Advancement would mean storytelling getting more sophisticated, not just production values getting more expensive. It would mean narrative innovation, formal experimentation that serves a dramatic purpose, and the development of distinctly Nigerian approaches to cinematic structure and rhythm. It would mean films that couldn’t be made anywhere else, that emerge from specific cultural contexts and artistic visions rather than attempting to replicate Western models with African aesthetics.
If technical sophistication becomes the primary marker of value, if visual spectacle is what critics praise and audiences reward, if “innovation” means accumulating Hollywood’s tools rather than developing Nigerian approaches, then that’s what will get made. We’ll get more films like Colours of Fire: technically ambitious, visually impressive, dramatically hollow. We’ll get an industry that looks sophisticated by certain metrics while remaining artistically immature by others. We’ll get Nollywood as wannabe Hollywood rather than Nollywood as itself.
The alternative requires different values, different priorities, different understanding of what advancement means. It requires institutional support for strong writing, for narrative experimentation, for filmmakers willing to follow their vision even when it doesn’t align with commercial calculation or technical showboating. It requires critics willing to distinguish between impressive production values and actual cinematic achievement. It requires audiences willing to demand more than spectacle. Most fundamentally, it requires recognising that cinema is an art form before it’s a technical exercise, that storytelling craft matters more than technological capability, that the engineering mindset needs to be balanced by dramatic sensibility.
Colours of Fire wants to be a leap forward. What it proves instead is that progress in cinema is not just about how much we can build, but about how carefully we choose what deserves to be built at all.
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big.