Ridley Scott lined up to direct World War II film

British director Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox have teamed up for a new project chronicling the famous 'Battle of Britain' during Word War II. Matthew Orton, a British screenwriter who has a film in production about the attempts to track down the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, will be writing the script for the film. The plot will focus on the summer and autumn of 1940, when the German Luftwaffe and British RAF clashed in the skies over the United Kingdom, locked in the largest sustained bombing campaign at that time. This was a significant turning point of World War II. Despite their months of targeting Britain’s air bases, military posts and its civilian population, the Luftwaffe failed to gain air superiority over the RAF and ended up losing the Battle of Britain. It will be the first film to focus on the aerial conflict since the 1969 epic Battle of Britain starring Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer and Michael Caine. Scott has just completed the second prequel of the Alien sci-fi franchise Alien: Covenant, The veteran filmmaker is also busy with two other projects: an adaptation of Don Winslow’s crime novel The Cartel, a work based on the kidnapping of John Paul Getty; and a Navy seal drama starring Tom Hardy. Additionally, the Blade Runner director has a number of other works in progress for TV.