“Colours of Fire”: A Promising Fantasy Undone By A Weak Script

When Akinbode (Uzor Arukwe) is sent to kill a monster, he leaves his home believing he understands exactly what he is fighting. He has been told the creature is the product of the Red Tribe, an enemy community responsible for terrorising his people. He has been raised inside a worldview where the Reds are not simply rivals but a threat, and he sees destroying them as an act of duty. On his quest, he meets Moremi (Osas Ighodaro).

Instead of finding the terrifying beast he has been promised, Akinbode encounters a woman from the community he has been taught to fear. Their attraction begins to unravel his certainty about the conflict and forces him to question the stories that have shaped his understanding of the enemy. It is a compelling premise. Unfortunately, Colours of Fire rarely handles its best ideas with the same confidence it shows at first.

Directed by Niyi Akinmolayan, the fantasy epic premiered in Nigerian cinemas on December 24, 2025, before making its way to Netflix over the weekend on August 7. The film was positioned as an ambitious experiment in “Afrofusion”, combining African mythology, pan-African influences, elaborate costumes and cutting-edge visual technology. There is plenty to admire in the concept, but the film’s most important idea is sharper than its execution. The story follows a world divided between the Blue and Red tribes, whose identities have been shaped by colour, magic, history and inherited suspicion. Blue is associated with sacred power and prosperity, while Red has become synonymous with blood, darkness, and danger. Akinbode’s mission rests on the belief that this division is natural, even sacred. The film’s most interesting question is simple and strong: who decided who the monster was?

Colours of Fire understands that enemies are rarely born fully formed. They are made. Communities create stories about one another; those stories become myths, myths become tradition, and eventually people inherit hatred as though it were an essential part of their identity. The Blue and Red tribes have spent generations turning each other into caricatures, with fear doing the work of history. That is the film’s strongest idea, and it should be the one everything else serves. The problem is that Colours of Fire did not properly execute it.

Rather than allowing its themes to emerge naturally through its characters and conflicts, the screenplay frequently announces what the audience is supposed to understand. Characters explain the mythology, explain the conflict, explain the stakes and, eventually, explain the revelations. The film is so determined to make its world feel epic that it often forgets the audience needs to feel the central idea, not simply be told.

This is particularly frustrating because the basic storyline is actually good. There is enough material here for a genuinely moving story about propaganda, tribalism, inherited hatred, and the danger of turning other people into abstractions. Instead, the film repeatedly trims its own complexity with dialogues and scenes that can be clumsy, overwrought and, at times, unintentionally silly. The dialogue often reaches for profundity and lands somewhere closer to theatrical grandstanding. Characters speak as though they are reciting folktales rather than having conversations with one another. The result is that even moments that should carry emotional or political weight can feel strangely artificial.

This is a shame because the cast is much better than the material they were given. Uzor Arukwe brings a restrained physicality to Akinbode, making his gradual destabilisation believable. Osas Ighodaro is particularly compelling as Moremi, bringing sensuality, danger, and conviction to a character who could easily have become little more than a fantasy archetype. Ibrahim Chatta gives Baba Agba a grounded presence, while Gabriel Afolayan brings sincerity to the Prince’s parallel journey. The performances are among the film’s strongest elements because they constantly suggest a more interesting movie underneath the script.

Moremi and Akinbode, in particular, should be the emotional centre of the film. Their relationship has the potential to do the thematic heavy lifting. What happens when the person you have been taught to hate becomes someone you desire, trust, and recognise? What happens when intimacy makes prejudice harder to maintain? But the romance often feels underdeveloped, and the characters are not given enough psychological depth for the relationship to carry the enormous symbolic weight placed on it.

And then there are the visuals. There is no question that Colours of Fire is trying to push Nollywood beyond its familiar visual boundaries. Its costumes, production design, choreography, and colour work are ambitious, and there are moments when the film genuinely looks like nothing else in the local mainstream space. But the film’s dependence on digital effects frequently works against that ambition. The AI-generated imagery is especially distracting; many of the AI-assisted visuals look conspicuous and artificial, pulling attention away from the characters and the story. The technology often feels less like a tool being used to serve the film and more like a demonstration of what the filmmakers were able to make a computer do. There was so much derision of the visuals on social media that Niyi Akonmolayan felt the need to defend the choice publicly. 

The excessive use of AI is particularly frustrating because the film already has strong visual ingredients. The costumes are striking. The colour symbolism is effective. The music and dance sequences create a distinctive atmosphere. There are enough good creative choices on screen without constantly layering increasingly obvious digital imagery on top of them. What it lacks is a script strong enough to bring all those elements together.

Most frustratingly, the film gets tantalisingly close to something meaningful. The idea that we can be taught to hate people we have never met is powerful. The idea that myths can become weapons is powerful. The idea that falling in love with someone from the other side can expose the absurdity of an inherited conflict is powerful. Colours of Fire simply does not handle those ideas with enough subtlety.