BLUE WORLD ORDER

There’s been a recent explosion of Australian filmmakers who have made their bones - or are on the way to doing so - via low-budget genre flicks: Shane Abbess (The Osiris Child, Infini), Zak Hilditch (the underrated These Final Hours), Hugh Sullivan (The Infinite Man), John V. Soto (Needle, The Gateway) and Ben C. Lucas (OtherLife). Ambitious, epic fantasy/sci-fi, done independently on a low budget, is not an easy road to traverse. Multiplexes pack their session schedules with unlimited showings of the latest studio-funded cash cow, leaving little room for independently produced offerings to even get decent theatrical distribution. Canberra-based filmmaker Ché Baker toiled for several years to create his maiden fantasy/sci-fi feature film: Blue World Order.

Set a few years from now, it tells the tale of Jake (Jake Ryan) who, after an EMP renders anything electrical into a paperweight, scavenges to survive amidst the chaos of the wastelands and struggles to give medical help to his daughter Molly (Billie Rutherford) who is afflicted by an unknown illness. When Jake stumbles across a fortified camp of survivors, he meets a doctor, named Harris (Jack Thompson) who claims to have a treatment that will cure his child. Jake soon finds that the camp is not a refuge at all, with the inhabitants affected by a mysterious transmission putting them under the control of a sinister technological force.

Aided by an affable escapee named Madcap (Stephen Hunter), Jake takes Molly and heads for refuge elsewhere. Soon after, Jake encounters old martial arts teacher-turned-adversary, Master Crane (Billy Zane) who appears to be involved with the biotech threat, though all is not as it seems.

Cinematographer Robb Shaw-Velden’s camerawork lends the requisite gloss to the production, particularly in the car action sequences and fight choreography. The special and visual effects are well executed, with creature prosthetic's and digital effects lending a decidedly handmade touch to the production. Baker, co-writer/co-director Dallas Bland and co -writer Sarah Mason, eschew the cerebral ‘ideas driven’ minimalist approach that can often be the result of the restrictiveness of low-budget genre films these days and instead, go all out 'balls-to-the-wall', much as Neil Marshall did with his mash-up of 80’s genres, this harks back to 80’s post-apocalyptic wasteland films (such as Mad Max and its creative spawn: Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, Steel Dawn or Battle Truck) as well as martial arts genre films such as Van Damme’s Cyborg and more recent tech-noir action fare, exemplified by films such as The Matrix.

Shot in and around Canberra, in the ACT, Blue World Order also serves as a treatise on how to wring the utmost production value out of a relatively small region, one that provides a variety of facilities and outdoor locations in which to film. So, aside from the action spectacle, ‘run-and-gun’ blaster battles and martial arts-fight scenes, this is an audacious attempt by Baker and his team to pull together the collective contributions of local Canberran fans, extras and professional practitioners of ‘Film Craft’  - and prove that a local film industry can certainly grow and establish itself at the crossroads of vision and reality.