“The Chief Of War” (Series Premiere)

Blood, butts, boats, and beauty: There are worse foundations upon which to build your historical epic. Judging by the sheer quantity of each in the series premiere of Chief of War, Apple TV+’s brutal and beautiful new saga of war-torn late 18th century Hawaii, this show’s on solid ground. Filmed entirely in Hawaiian and fueled by the simmering star power of Jason Momoa, who co-created the show and co-wrote the episode with Thomas Pa‘a Sibbett, it’s proof that the “Game of Thrones but in the real world” success of Shōgun was no fluke. Executed with care and charisma, it’s a formula that works.

An opening montage sets the scene. The Hawaiian islands stand divided into four perpetually warring kingdoms: O‘ahu, Maui, Kaua‘i, and Hawai‘i. While a prophecy foretold that a king would arise to unify the islands and their people following the arrival of a star with a feathered cape, just such a comet came and went decades earlier, and no such messianic monarch has appeared.

That’s where Maui’s king, Kahekili (Temuera “Boba Fett” Morrison), enters the picture. A warmonger of long standing, he’s received intel that the high priest of nearby O‘ahu is using his inexperienced young king as a catspaw to prepare an unprovoked invasion of Maui. If Kahekili strikes first, he can thwart the invasion — and, perhaps, take his first steps toward fulfilling the ancient prophecy. 

His success, however, hinges on winning back a deserter from his cause. When we meet our hero, Ka‘iana (Momoa, at last in the star vehicle he deserves), he’s busy killing a shark with his bare hands by lassoing it, getting dragged behind it, grabbing it by the dorsal fin, and stuffing poison into its gills by hand. I know, I know, it sounds easy, but let’s see you try!

But despite his prowess, we soon discover that Ka‘iana is a man without a country. Though he lives in the kingdom of Kaua‘i — alongside his wife, Kupuohi (Te Ao o Hinpepehinga); her sister, Heke (Mainei Kinimaka); and his brothers, big-haired Nāhi (Siua Ikale‘o) and mulleted Nāmake (Te Kohe Tuhaka) — he’s actually in self-imposed exile from Maui. Though he once served as Kahekili’s war chief, hence the show’s title, he quit his majesty’s service rather than continue to wage his bloodthirsty wars of greed and conquest. One of those wars got Ka‘iana and his brothers’ father needlessly killed, and that’s hard to forgive.

In the end, it’s to preserve his late father’s honor rather than Maui’s safety that Ka‘iana decides to fight O‘ahu. The king reveals that the rival nation’s high priest desecrated his father’s bones in an attempt to make a propitious sacrifice for the coming war. Devastated and enraged, the brothers reconsecrate the bones and head off to war — but Ka‘iana, still wary of pointless bloodshed, plans a diversion that should allow them to take the kingdom nearly without a fight, taking down its scheming high priest but sparing its boy king.

Kahekili has a different plan in mind. While Ka‘iana is busy holding up his end of the bargain, the king leads his fleet ashore prematurely, sacking the enemy’s sacred temple and slaughtering everyone inside of it atop a holy site. 

Arriving too late to stop the massacre, Ka‘iana is outraged at having been hoodwinked into participating in the bloody conquest. So is Prince Kūpule (Brandon Finn), Kahekili’s basically decent son — but that doesn’t stop him from ordering spies to monitor Ka‘iana and his family in case the restive war chief tries anything funny. After watching Kahekili mercilessly execute the young king for no reason, he wears a look on his face that says he knows he’s been tricked by a psychopath. How long before he strikes back?

Well, you don’t cast Jason Momoa in this role if some striking back isn’t in its future — he’s the sort of actor whose piercing stare and superhuman body make him seem less like a human being and more like a gun with the safety off or a sword halfway drawn from its scabbard. Momoa has played plenty of tough customers since his breakout role as Khal Drogo, the horse-riding warlord in the first season of Game of Thrones, but this role understands there’s something both tough and tender to the guy in a way nothing else has. I wouldn’t want to be King Kahekili with this guy glaring at me, but I would want to be Kupuohi when he comes home from a long day on the battlefield and needs a cuddle, you know?

I promise you, however, that I’m going to note one last time that Momoa virtually nude throughout the episode — he’s virtually nude throughout the episode, I’m talking a loincloth and that’s it, and it hides nothing in the rear view department mind you — and leave it at that. I don’t want to be seen as making light of Hawaiian civilization’s dress code, I want to be seen as making light of the fact that a famously handsome actor is cheeks to the wind for the bulk of the episode, and I think that point has been made.

The central tension of Momoa as an actor is the same tension of Ka‘iana as a character: He’s built for violence, but he simply isn’t a violent man by nature. He can be, but he doesn’t want to be; circumstances, and skullduggery, force his hand. This tension is reflected in the magnificent island setting, a gorgeous backdrop of blue water, green foliage, and lush red-and-yellow helms and capes. Director Justin Chon proves equally adept at the pretty and the gritty, with long shots of landscapes and tableaux of people eating or talking that hit nearly as hard as shark tooth–studded clubs splitting skulls in half and sawing people’s mouths open chunk by gnarly chunk.

Which is a roundabout way of saying this episode will stop you short with both its loveliness and its repulsiveness. How, you wonder, could people in paradise, wearing the plumage of the birds of the heavens themselves, possibly bring themselves to soak the ground in each other’s blood with apparently alarming frequency?

But this is an eternal question, and not one limited to the shorelines of the Hawaiian islands. All throughout human history, people just like you and me have convinced themselves they don’t have it good enough, and the only way to have it better is to kill other people from other nations, at home or abroad, in hopes this creates some kind of trickle-down effect of happiness. In reality, all that trickles down is blood, either staining our hands or, eventually and inevitably, spilled from our own veins.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.