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SINK OR SWIM.

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Wolfgang Petersen, the director of "Das Boot" and "The Perfect Storm," is back in the water. In "Poseidon," a remake of "The Poseidon Adventure," the German-born Petersen swamps a ship, sends rivets popping, and washes away furniture, crockery, and corpses in a foamy digital flood. What is it with this guy and the sea? Something prenatal, perhaps. I don't know that anyone was longing for a new version of the campy disaster "classic" from 1972. Real disasters have recently taken hold of our imagination--and of our movies, too. After you've seen "United 93," it's hard to regard "Poseidon" as anything more than an extremely well-crafted exercise in physical invention and fear. Yet within those limits--the limits of a pop-digital survival drama--"Poseidon" is an exciting show. Petersen appears both to love water and to be intensely afraid of it; he may not have anything fresh to say, but he's wrung an infinite variety of physical sensations out of his obsession.

Three decades ago, the producer Irwin Allen, an indefatigable marketer of cinematic destruction, entertained an innocent public with such spectacles as "The Towering Inferno" and "The Swarm." In "The Poseidon Adventure," his most famous extravaganza, a giant wave hits a luxury passenger vessel, which turns turtle and slowly begins to sink. Gene Hackman, as a priest who doesn't believe in waiting for God's help, takes charge...

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