One of the timeless functions of cinematic storytelling is the way it allows us to explore in safety the fears that impinge occasionally on our daily lives. But that dynamic alters when reality itself is saturated in dread and anxiety. The merest glance at the headlines produces enough plots to furnish an entire studio’s slate of dystopian science-fiction movies.

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Robots taking over, social media algorithms adversely shaping the political landscape, giant mega-hurricanes piled one on top of another, bees dying out, global pandemics looming in the face of enfeebled antibiotics. And when life isn’t imitating art, it’s imitating bad B-movies. Sharknado may have knowingly pushed the idea of natural catastrophe into absurdity. (Tornadoes are too weak as they pass over water to lift sharks from the ocean, the National Geographic helpfully reassured its readers when the original film was released in 2013.) But only just. Plenty of other creatures are prone to be sucked up and deposited on land during bouts of inclement weather. Put it this way: Gatornado could really happen.

The satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer famously observed that “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize”. The current occupant of the White House has seen to it that Lehrer’s comment looks now like the gravest of understatements. But the sentiment can be extended to apply to the perilous state of society in general. If satire is dead or dying, eclipsed and outstripped by its real-life equivalent, then the old-fashioned disaster movie isn’t any healthier. Apocalypse can only lose its cinematic allure once cinema-goers begin to feel that it’s already upon us anyway.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘As the disaster movie has fallen in popularity, the superhero genre, such as Batman v Superman, has got more popular.’ Photograph: Clay Enos/AP

Disaster movies tend to be sporadic these days, hinging on specific recent events (The Impossible, which focused on one family during the 2004 tsunami in Thailand) or those safely consigned to history (Pompeii) rather than throwing ghoulish predictions and hypotheses at the screen as the genre did during the 1970s heyday that produced films such as The Towering Inferno, Earthquake! and The Poseidon Adventure. There have been occasional exceptions influenced by the onslaught of climate change, the most high-profile examples coming from the director Roland Emmerich, who made 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow. But the strong air of fatigue that surrounds these blockbusters, and that also permeated Emmerich’s sequel last year to his own 1996 hit Independence Day, might be attributed to over-familiarity. Audiences can’t be blamed for feeling jaded at the sight of the planet being destroyed. It isn’t only that it’s too near the knuckle. We’ve seen it so many times on screen that the natural reaction is to say: “It’s not the end of the world.” Even when it is.

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As the disaster movie has fallen in popularity, the superhero genre has got more popular. Costumed proxies fight battles on our behalf, fixing the global catastrophes that make us feel impotent. What else is the plot of Batman v Superman but an imagined game of brinkmanship in which a simple misunderstanding, a stitch-up job fuelled by machismo, pushes two titans to the edge of war?

But there are some conflicts too complicated and amorphous even for superheroes to ameliorate. If one element in the modern world has reconfigured the idea of threat in film more than any other, it is the changing nature of terrorism. With the exception of United 93 and World Trade Center, there has been a general reluctance on the part of mainstream narrative cinema to reshape material that exists already in visual form in our collective memory. Asked where we were when the planes hit the towers on 9/11, many of us are able to reply: “I was watching it on television.” The filmmaker hasn’t yet emerged who feels she or he can add demonstrably to that bank of images.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno. Photograph: Moviestore/REX Shutterstock

A troubled world doesn’t lead necessarily to a hunger for escapism in our entertainment. Quite the contrary. If the prospect of a dystopian or unjust reality quenched our need to see it reflected and analysed, then the recent TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale wouldn’t have found the acclaim or the audience that it did, and the racially charged horror movie Get Out would not already be one of the highest-grossing films of the year.

It’s a truism that great art flourishes under hostile environments and administrations. But if the future appeal of worst-case scenarios such as Sharknado or Independence Day looks in doubt, then the beneficiaries will be those film-makers driven to ask why exactly our world is so messed up rather than imagining how much worse it could be.

• Ryan Gilbey is a film critic and writer