Is The Rescue actually good?

The Rescue sits in the 99.5% percentile against all 52,376 ranked films, meaning it scores above 99.5% of them. That figure is a rank, not a star average: each reviewer's score is re-centred on their own rating history before anything is compared, so a generous grader and a harsh one count the same.

How does The Rescue compare to similar films?

Within Films · 2020s, The Rescue lands in the 99.6% percentile. The cohort comparison exists because a global rank flatters or punishes a film for its category rather than its quality.

How many reviewers is The Rescue's score based on?

95 reviewers cleared the calibration test for The Rescue — meaning their rating history varies enough to place a personal baseline. Reviewers who rate everything the same carry no information and are excluded rather than averaged in.

How is the The Rescue score calculated?

Every review is scored relative to the reviewer's own average rather than taken at face value, then each calibrated reviewer is weighted equally and the result is expressed as a percentile against the full corpus. The output is a rank among peers, which is why it is published as a percentile and never as a star rating.

2021

global pct

99.5

Film · 2021 · Films · 2020s

The Rescue

Name: The Rescue
Genre: Action, Documentary, Mystery
Released: 2021
Duration: 1 h 51 min

Scored from 95 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).

99.5%

Global percentile

vs. all 52,376 ranked titles

99.6%

In-cohort percentile

Films · 2020s · 7,930 titles

99.9%

AI-adjusted percentile

95 calibrated reviewers, thin samples pulled to the mean

Summary

In June 2018 twelve boys from a junior football team and their 25-year-old assistant coach walked into the Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand and were trapped kilometres from the entrance when monsoon rain flooded the passages behind them. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin's documentary follows the operation that gathered at the cave mouth and settles on a small group of middle-aged British recreational cave divers, among them Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, whose unusual hobby made them the only people able to reach the far chambers. With the water rising and the air running down, they face a problem no rescue has previously solved. It is assembled from news archive, footage shot by the divers themselves and reconstructions staged with the participants.

The Rescue (2021) is a film IMDb files under the action, documentary and mystery genres. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is PG. It runs 1h 51m.

Only 95 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 98 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 77 of whom clear the calibration test. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,929 2020s films, not against the whole corpus.

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 The Rescue 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 · 2020s (7,930 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 95.