Air Force One | Los Angeles International Airport — Boarding at a Sheremetyevo That Never Existed

Six men walk onto the plane carrying press credentials. It is the calmest sequence in the film and the one that makes the rest possible: bags on a cart, a nodding Secret Service agent, a Russian news crew that is not a news crew. The gate is supposed to be Sheremetyevo, outside Moscow. It is LAX.

Airports are hard to fake and easy to borrow, and by the mid-1990s Los Angeles International had a long habit of playing other cities' terminals for the crews who lived twenty minutes away. The wide glass, the jet bridges, the anonymous mid-century concourses — dress the signage in Cyrillic, keep the camera tight, and nobody in the audience is checking the runway numbers.

The building most worth your time is not a terminal at all. The Theme Building, that white parabolic arch of 1961, still stands in the middle of the loop road, and the Flight Path Museum sits on Imperial Highway at the south edge of the field. Stand at the museum fence on a clear afternoon with the departures stacking up over Sepulveda, and the ordinary business of boarding a plane looks, briefly, like the beginning of something.