Review: Momoa’s ‘Chief of War’ mixes Hawaiian history with Hollywood flair

01 Aug 2025, 16:00 by New York Times · Star-Advertiser

PHOTO COURTESY APPLE TV+

Ka‘iana (Jason Momoa), standing center, leads his warriors against the enemy in an episode of “Chief of War.”

Nearly everything written about “Chief of War” — the new series set in 18th-century Hawaii for which Honolulu-born Jason Momoa was a creator, writer, director and star — has referred to the show as a passion project. And for about four minutes, at the show’s beginning, it feels like one.

The camera glides along brilliant blue water, trailing a skeletal catamaran. We hear wind, waves and the slap of paddles. Momoa towers over the paddlers, seemingly too big for the boat, before hurling himself into the water. Then — using a rope and a few flasks of numbing kava — he single-handedly catches a shark.

It’s a lovely and disarming scene, one that makes clever use of Momoa’s hulking physique against the dramatic backdrops of land and sea. And there isn’t another scene like it in the season’s nine episodes (the first two of which premiere Friday on Apple TV+). There are moments of impressive violence and satisfying melodrama. But what starts like a passion project settles into work as usual.

Momoa, who created the show with Thomas Paʻa Sibbett and wrote it with Sibbett and Doug Jung, plays Ka’iana, a member of one of many royal families at a time when each Hawaiian island was its own kingdom. “Chief of War” takes place at the start of a period in the late 1700s when a series of conflicts led to the unification of the islands under a single king, and when increasing numbers of European and American ships began arriving.

The show comes into its premiere carrying a seal of approval as the rare production to portray Hawaiian history from a native Hawaiian viewpoint, using the Hawaiian language (along with a fair bit of English). That responsibility may account for the solemnity that marks the storytelling; the show’s fealty to the history is at the typical television-drama level, however.

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It is stuffed with people, like Ka’iana, who existed and with events that took place, but the story that is spun from them is largely fanciful. Timelines and relationships are juggled and fictionalized in the service of creating love stories, compressing and juicing up the course of war, and sharpening the depredations of the incipient colonists (referred to here as the paleskins).

The goal is spectacle rather than scrupulousness, and you can sense some of the models the creators had in mind. There are echoes of “Shogun” in the depiction of a trans-Pacific culture clash. The complicated warfare among the Hawaiian nations, with its emphasis on bloodlines and prophesy, calls to mind “Game of Thrones,” the series that established Momoa as a costume-drama action hero.

There is also, despite the possible best intentions of everyone involved, a Polynesian kitsch factor that gets more pronounced as the season goes along: death by volcano, towers of skulls, a computer-enhanced land sled race that would not look out of place in a Marvel movie.

The towering Momoa, whether in loincloths or tight sailor’s breeches, is a special effect in his own right, and his disarmingly modest presence is what’s most likely to keep you engaged whenever he’s on-screen. Ka’iana is less a coherent character than a tool the show uses to make its points about family, honor and the looming threat of the white man; he doesn’t require a lot of range, and he is particularly lacking in humor, which is probably a good thing given the unsettling experience of watching Momoa try for laughs in “A Minecraft Movie.”

“Chief of War” rumbles along for eight episodes as the kind of handsomely produced epic that you might remember fondly if you saw it when you were young enough. If you make it to the ninth episode — the one Momoa directed — you are in for an entirely different kind of treat, a bloody Ridley Scott-meets-Cecil B. DeMille fantasia against a backdrop of flowing lava. Apparently that was part of Momoa’s passion, too.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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