Honestly, I’d give Agbara Nla: The Return a 2/10, and that 2 is largely for the improvement in production quality. My problem isn’t that it is a Christian film. My problem is that, for a film released in 2026 and put in cinemas, the storytelling feels painfully stuck in another era that this generation has moved on from. It is essentially the same old God vs Devil, believer vs occultist, spiritual warfare cycle we have seen repeatedly in Christian films for decades. There is nothing particularly fresh, provocative or intellectually interesting about the narrative. And at some point, this endless recycling of the same Christian folktale structure becomes tiring and exhausting. A remake should not simply take an old story, give it better cameras, better lighting, better sets and put it in a cinema. The story itself has to evolve. There was a huge opportunity here to preserve the essence of Agbara Nla while asking what spiritual warfare, faith, manipulation, evil, power and belief actually look like in 2026. What does this story mean to a generation growing up with social media, AI, internet spirituality, online prophets, religious influencers, economic desperation, digital scams, new forms of occultism and an increasingly complicated relationship with religion? Instead, we got the same old rhetoric dressed in contemporary production. And that is where I think Christian filmmaking needs to be more ambitious. This generation has moved on. You cannot keep telling every generation the same folktale of an obviously evil devil confronting obviously righteous Christians and expect the audience to experience it as profound simply because the characters pray, speak in tongues and invoke Jesus. Cinema has evolved. Storytelling has evolved. Audiences have evolved. Christian narratives needs to evolve too. I also understand why people are celebrating it. There is excitement around finally seeing a Christian production receive a proper cinema release, and I genuinely understand that feeling. But I also think some of the reactions are spiritually performative. People are praying in the cinema, speaking in tongues, getting emotional and then declaring that the movie was “excellent” as though the spiritual experience automatically validates the filmmaking. It doesn’t. Spirituality is not an excuse for a lack of excellence. You can be deeply moved by the message and still admit that the screenplay was weak. You can love the actors and still admit that the narrative was underdeveloped. You can celebrate Christian representation in cinemas and still demand better writing, better characterisation, better pacing and more imaginative storytelling. And to be honest, some of the comedy and sarcasm worked for me. There were moments I genuinely enjoyed. But as a cinematic experience, I thought it was underwhelming. It felt more like a well-produced YouTube Christian movie that had been upgraded for the big screen than a film that was actually conceived with the ambition, complexity and narrative intelligence that cinema demands. And ironically, the best part of the night for me had very little to do with the movie. I was watching it with the love of my life.❤️