The music video, directed by Roboshobo (Robert Schober), debuted on December 7, 2008, on Metallica's official website and
Yahoo! Video. The video, which does not feature the band, is an
alternate history narrative done in grainy
mockumentary style, depicting a sequence of fictional events following the historic 1908
Tunguska event, at which Soviet scientists discover spores of an extraterrestrial organism, a small harmless thing resembling an armored worm. However, it turns out the incredibly hardy spores are able to reanimate dead tissue, and subjects turn violent sometime after exposure to the spores; a cartoon then shows the
USSR adapting them as a bioweapon and scattering them from balloons in a preemptive strike against the U.S., causing a localized
zombie apocalypse before intervening militarily to distribute humanitarian aid. At the end of the cartoon, a hybrid U.S.–USSR flag is raised in the now-Soviet-ruled America, and in 1972, a headless corpse is shown breaching containment and escaping from a Soviet biowarfare lab.
Video origin Initially, in a video on the website Metclub.com,
Kirk Hammett explained the origins of the video. He claimed to have bought the film from a fan for $5 in Russia and soon forgot about it. After digging it up and watching the animated film, he said that he was fascinated by it, researched about its background, and asked a friend's Russian girlfriend to translate parts of it. Following this, Hammett had supposedly been trying to incorporate the film into one of the band's music videos. However, as it was later revealed, Hammett's story was a fake to produce hype about the video: the film was not made in Russia and Hammett did not actually buy it there. Rather, as the video's director Roboshobo stated in an interview, the live action segments (including the ending) were specially shot to look like excerpts of old Russian documentary footage. The video bears similarities to the underground documentary
Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, where animal experimentation to produce
life extension is depicted. The subtitles and everything else included in the video are part of its concept. The word "Тунгусский" ("Tunguska") appears several times with different typos ("тунгузский", "тунзский", "тчнгзский"). ==Lyrical meaning==