On a warm fall day in a scruffy suburb of this Canadian city, some familiar sights appear. French-language road signs note estimated distances in kilometers. Beret-wearing soldiers stand guard. A restaurant offers a poutine special.

And then, suddenly, some less familiar ones: large sections of the White House, built to scale and scattered across several neighborhoods of the city. The elegant South Portico, fronted by a lawn big enough for a couple of military helicopters. An elegant pool, in which, at the moment, a sturdy armored car known as “The Beast” is flipped on its back. A gallery of presidential portraits in a carefully appointed room.

No, the local populace hasn’t developed a love affair with the topography of Washington, D.C. The buildings are sets for “White House Down,” a Channing Tatum-Jamie Foxx action movie directed by Hollywood’s go-to explosion maestro Roland Emmerich (“The Day After Tomorrow”). And by the looks of things, with sections of the facade scorched and shell casings everywhere, our national landmark is not doing well.

In a filmmaking culture heavily reliant on computer-generated images, massive structures built from scratch would be odd. That they form one of the most recognizable buildings in the Western world makes it even more surreal, a Tower of Babel-like project where American political and pop-cultural landmarks are erected by a German-born director in a city proud of its French heritage.

“It’s something, yes?” noted Emmerich, a ballcap pulled tight over his head as he took a break from blowing up Washington by grabbing a seat in his trailer. “In ‘Independence Day,’” continued Emmerich, 57, referring to his alien-invasion blockbuster, “when I wanted to show the White House, I put up some blue curtains and a sign, and that was it. I didn’t want to do that this time.” After all, things have changed in the 17 years since that movie came out. Audiences in this post-”Cribs” world expect access to famous residences.

Although the Montreal sets (shot here for tax credit and space reasons) were built in the service of popcorn entertainment, their ambition raises larger questions: Is there room for physically constructed effects in an era when most illusions are designed on a computer monitor? And can iconic governmental symbols move an audience possibly numb to the sight of cities blowing up every other weekend at the multiplex (not to mention the news)?

Emmerich and his team went to great lengths to re-create the White House for the film, where characters fight and escape through not just the recognizable sites but also catacombs, elevator shafts and secondary kitchens.

The director and his production designer, Kirk Petruccelli (“The Incredible Hulk,” “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”), took several White House tours. They spent days poring over books, looking at where passageways lay, or when and how changes were made in the building’s 222-year history. Much of the White House’s Byzantine layout is out there if you look hard enough.

“I want Obama to look at this movie and say, ‘How did they know all of that?’” Petruccelli said, standing in front of one set that he said took hundreds of crew members working round-the-clock for several days to build. Nearly all the major wings and rooms were reconstructed, including almost half the complex in a giant indoor space the crew nicknamed “The Bubble.”

Nor was the design limited to the buildings. To re-create the Beast — the heavily armored presidential car whose details are a tightly guarded secret — they undertook a different kind of effort. Graham Kelly, a crew member with the Emmerich-ian title of “action vehicle supervisor,” tried to work sources, including a friend of a friend who worked in the White House garage.

“I’m surprised I wasn’t arrested by the end,” Kelly said as he stood in a structure fiddling with one of several replicas he helped design for the movie — a vehicle that will shortly be pummeled into oblivion in a heavy-duty action sequence.

In real life, the White House has endured a pretty much peaceful existence since it got out of the 19th century. But it’s come under fire a lot since then in the movies. In fact, it’s been shot at, assaulted, set ablaze and otherwise abused so often that Disney keeps a replica of the Oval Office on its lot that filmmakers can rent.

Emmerich layers his big spectacle with bits of self-knowing comedy (e.g., “Can you not hit me in the head with a rocket launcher while I’m trying to drive?,” as said rocket launcher is then put to good use). He then combines it with an earnestness that has characters making proclamations like, “Our country is stronger than one house.”

The throwback quality to the film comes not only with its God-and-country idealism but also in the mechanics of the story. Tatum is a well-meaning underachiever given a chance to finally do something heroic, not necessarily (but most probably) in a blaze of gunfire — a conceit that seems right out of, well, a 1990s-era Roland Emmerich fantasy.

But though the filmmaker helped usher in the modern summer effects movie, he is unhappy with what he has wrought. “I don’t really like comic-book movies,” he said. “I don’t believe them when I’m watching them. I wanted to make this film to show that heroes can be real people, which I think we’ve forgotten about.”