Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird Blu-ray Movie Review

"Welcome to our show. We are not your friends. We come here only to dance..."

Reviewed by Kenneth Brown May 8, 2025

Since their explosive breakout album in 2000, At the Drive-In, and then as their next incarnation, The Mars Volta, Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala, two outsiders from El Paso, have fearlessly redefined the progressive rock genre. Their unique style fused jazz, punk rock, Latin influences and experimental sounds into something electrifying. But their immense artistic success gave way to deep personal fissures that ended their musical partnership in 2013, and inflicted wounds that would take more than a decade to heal. Culled from hundreds of hours of footage filmed by Omar over the past forty years, Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird charts the duo's intense and profound journey as they navigate success, addiction, tragedy, betrayal, forgiveness and, ultimately, redemption.

The tale of tales at the center of Omar and Cedric is the rise of The Mars Volta, which begins with the breakup of At the Drive-In, a high- energy post-hardcore band that had gained a significant following in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Tensions, touring exhaustion and creative differences rendered a rift over fifteen years and came to a head in 2001. The band split rather unceremoniously. Home video footage tracks the assembling and disassembling in succinct order, following Omar Rodríguez-López (guitarist) and Cedric Bixler-Zavala (vocalist), young spitfire musicians, on their journey towards some sort of bizarre brilliance. Though what that brilliance is remains unclear to all but Omar and Cedric. Even they seem unsure of where success lies. Fortunately for the duo, neither one cares much about success. They only want to rock. Or play. Or take the stage. Or experiment. Or create. All of which proves beneficial for the next stretch of their career: The Mars Volta.

Omar and Cedric decide to forge a new path, one that takes them far away from the confines of post-hardcore and into experimental rock, blending everything from jazz to psychedelia, Latin music and progressive rock. The camcorders improve while the music transcends. Two years later, "De-Loused in the Comatorium" hits the scene. Mars Volta's first album. It's a stirring opening volley -- atmospheric, dense and chaotic -- blending avant-garde elements with the story of one of Cedric's late friends, who had spent time in a coma before dying. The songs are unpredictable, disconnected, complex, highly experimental, full of improv and solos and intense fourth-wall breaks. Commercial success is set aside and the purity of music is elevated, shoving "Comatorium" to cult fame. The Mars Volta rejoices at its arrival. Fandom is limited but precise, drawing crowds of similarly inspired fans eager for something new and fresh.

From there the film rockets from lineup shift to lineup shift, album to album, documenting the process behind the band's unique take on genre and impulsive energy. With a burgeoning reputation for spontaneity, The Mars Volta begins featuring a revolving door of artists attracted to the freedom Omar and Cedric provide. Concept albums like "Francis the Mute," inspired by the discovery of an old journal, find the band delivering bold 12-minute songs, jazzing their way into genres typically unassociated with rock. Even the size of the band's audience seems of little concern to Omar and Cedric; the duo possessed by the warring gods of music, forcing the titans to come together at a table of The Mars Volta's making. With "Amputechture," funk and Latin music join the fray, simmering rock and jazz hostilities, as the band pushes the boundaries of album construction even further away from anything traditional or comfortable. Omar and Cedric seem to be daring their fans to revolt. But, of course, they don't. The brilliance here is in the new and unpredictable. The more unpredictable the album, the more rabid the small legion of fans dedicated to Omar and Cedric's experimentation.

A cursed Israeli Ouija board serves as inspiration and a death knell in the late 2000s, as The Mars Volta's music turned back to aggression and kinetic beats. Alas, the same tensions that plagued At the Drive-In begin to surface and swell, leading to in-fighting and disagreement. Omar and Cedric began to go in separate directions, putting the band on hiatus in 2009. Omar forms the experimental band Bosnian Rainbows, and Cedric focuses on his other project, Antemasque. In 2012, The Mars Volta releases a self-titled album, but by then, it becomes clear to fans that the verve that had supplied the band’s energies has faded. The album is less complex and more focused on concise, straightforward rock songs, lacking the fire and chaos that defined their early work. The reviews are mixed, with many fans feeling that the band’s creative peak had passed. The band disbands, and Omar and Cedric remain musically estranged. They would reunite, briefly, in 2022 for a reunion album, but The Mars Volta's future is uncertain. The weirdness at the core of Omar and Cedric's friendship and partnership, though, remains intact and primed for further collaboration.

Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Seeing as Omar and Cedric is comprised of a collection of camera footage from forty years of personal filming -- footage captured on the fly by one of the band members -- you can imagine how rough and raw the presentation's 1080p/AVC-encoded video transfer tends to be. Newly recorded interviews are nowhere to be found and vintage camcorder footage represents the large majority of the film. The results, as you'd expect, are shaky and trend at times to the downright ugly. But there's an honesty to the scenes that provides the weirdness pointed to in the film's title. Omar and Cedric are strange dudes, but so comes their fans' attraction to their styles and approach. Thankfully colors are typically bold and vibrant, black levels deep and satisfying, and contrast nice and vivid. There are endless issues -- artifacting, banding, aliasing and the usual suspects alike -- but anyone familiar with music documentaries of this ilk won't be surprised or disappointed. This is The Mars Volta that lived and breathed and sang, on stage and behind the scenes, and any barriers or limitations are merely distractions to the main event.

Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

If there's real disappointment in Omar and Cedric it's that there isn't a 5.1 surround track to fully immerse fans in the music. However, seeing as the film is comprised of home video footage from over forty years, it's obvious why things are presented via LPCM 2.0 stereo and why it all sounds so cramped, compressed and canned.

Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only extra included is the film's theatrical trailer.

Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If Things Ever Get Weird... raise your hand? Press a buzzer? Stop the movie? Things get weird immediately and gloriously, and fans of experimental rock and particularly The Mars Volta will be the prime recipients of a strange but alluring documentary worth watching. The AV presentation is rough but expected. The small supplemental package is a disappointment but thus we roll forward.