There's an interesting corollary to disaster movie catastrophes, which is that by and large they're weirdly abstracted, you don't see the people suffering. You identify on a human level with the carefully-selected group of Characters, TM, who suffer from Pain and Death in carefully-balanced ratios, so that there's a bit of gosh-how-sad but not much this-is-a-human-tragedy. I agree with you that it's not really about empathy at all, and therefore is potentially dangerous, but in fact I suspect that on a generic and qualitative level it's about something rather different and very much emblematic rather than humanly real.

Or something. God, after a day of orientation admin it's so good to indulge in actual pseudo-analysis.