‘Chief of War' Review: Battleground Hawaii

New York Times

7 days ago

Nearly everything written about 'Chief of War' — the new series set in 18th-century Hawaii for which the 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.
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).
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