Film · 2018 · Films · 2010s
Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers
Scored from 158 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
This documentary profiles Bob Lazar, the physicist who claimed in 1989 to have worked on reverse-engineering extraterrestrial spacecraft at a secret site called S-4 near Area 51. Narrated by Mickey Rourke, the film revisits Lazar's allegations about element 115 and antimatter reactors, traces the personal and professional fallout from going public, and examines efforts by skeptics and supporters to verify his background and story.
Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers is a 2018 documentary film.
158 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 163 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 13,058 2010s films, not against the whole corpus. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 23 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2010s (13,059 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 158.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
