Alex Proyas' celestial battle epic Paradise Lost is inching towards production, and this morning brings the news that Camilla Belle is the director and studio's pick to play Eve: the rib-spawned squeeze of Adam. She'll join the already cast Bradley Cooper (playing Lucifer), Benjamin Walker (the Archangel Michael) and Casey Affleck (six-winged messenger angel Gabriel).
If the plan comes together it'll be a huge break for Belle, who's been acting since she was at least five years old, but has yet to make the jump to the A-list. Her child roles included Cathy in The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Holly in Roland Emmerich's The Patriot, and she made her adult debut in The Ballad of Jack and Rose in 2005. Since then there've been turns in the likes of Push and When a Stranger Calls, but even her Emmerich reunion 10,000 BC won't quite have prepared her for the scale Proyas is planning.
In John Milton's poem, Eve is tempted by Lucifer into eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, dooming all humankind to original sin, but also paving the way for its redemption through Jesus. In the film, according to Deadline, she "sparks the war that began all wars for the future of mankind." Women, eh?
The director has promised three enormous set-piece fight sequences - one in Heaven, one in Hell and one in Eden - contextually grounded in "an adventure about the origins of good and evil" and "a family saga about a group of brothers" which will stay "as faithful as possible" to Milton's blank verse.
Shooting is pencilled in for January, with Warners eyeing a release at the end of 2013.