Starting with the basic musical ingredients of The Day After Tomorrow and beefing them up is a good development, for that previously released 2004 score's weakness is its rather tepid tone and lethargic sense of movement and impact. Whether you accept Alien vs. Predator as a movie premise or not, and even in the absence of the franchise's individual motifs, Kloser did a more reasonable job with the score than anyone might have expected. Largely orchestral, Kloser combines his usual symphonic sound with a chorus and an array of slashing and grinding electronic sound effects. His theme for the film carries over the anthemic qualities from The Day After Tomorrow and is performed in a similarly deliberate style with emboldened brass and an enhanced choral presence. It's nothing as impressive as the depth he would conjure for 10,000 BC a few years later (plagiarism and all), but it's a solid step in that direction. The tone may be tongue in cheek to an extent, but the most enjoyable cues in Alien Vs. Predator are those during which Kloser instills the story with a sense of epic scope and awe-inspiring realization. The opening and closing titles, along with the "History of the World" cue (featuring a great snare-driven moment of bombast), provide enough interesting harmonic material to make the entirety worth some casual investigation. The overarching personality of the effort is surprisingly pleasant, with only four or five cues of outward battle music and several cues dedicated to choral-aided melody for moments of discovery and intrigue (perhaps a nod to Silvestri's space theme for his original Predator, but that's a stretch). Kloser does make an interesting distinction between the predators and aliens in his sound effects: the predator receives a metallic slashing sound for the wrist-worn blades it uses in battle and the alien produces a more extended, swishing and scraping sound that imitates its distinctive cry and whipping tail. With these two effects alternating in the fight cues, Kloser takes much more time to generate a coherent score than was probably necessary. The rest of Alien vs. Predator solicits the same response; the score is nothing spectacular, but it offers far more than was expected given the cheesiness of the film's concept. At the very least, the effort confirmed that Kloser, also a writer and producer for cinema, was serious about projecting his career in the direction of largely orchestral action efforts, with results that may be simplistic and wasted on poor films but show considerable promise in their intent. That said, nothing he generates in Alien vs. Predator can compete with the more muscular, strikingly hyperactive, and technically superior composition by Brian Tyler for Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem in 2007. It's all relative.  ***   @Amazon.com: CD or Download