3 – The Movies

There are three full length movies and one, Animatrix that has nine parts. Seeing and understanding Animatrix help to understand the others.

The first movie, ‘The Matrix’ movie is followed by two others –‘Reloaded’ and ‘Revolution’- that conclude the story. They are deep in plots and characters driven.

There is much about religion in the Matrix (see below the names of the people) even if it is not obvious. One must look for it.

The main people in The Matrix are:

–    Morpheus: He is the Captain of the Nebuchadnezzar, a hovercraft of the human forces of the last human city, Zion. Morpheus was once a human living inside the Matrix until he was freed.  Like other Hovercraft, Morpheus and his crew are dedicated to the protection of Zion and the freeing of humans from the Matrix. There he is described as a dangerous terrorist wanted by ‘Agents’, who appear to be Federal investigators but are sentient computer programs that patrol the Matrix, eliminating any threat to it. The humans believe that a gifted man born in the Matrix, a slave with a special gift that made him aware of the real nature of the Matrix, became the ‘first free man’ or “The original One”. A prophet said that “The One” will be reborn again and Morpheus is convinced that Neo is the New One he has been searching for all his life.
–    Neo, (real name Thomas A. Anderson, also known as The One) is the protagonist of The Matrix. Neo is also an anagram of ‘One’, a reference to his destiny of being ‘The One’ who would bring peace. At the start of the series, Thomas Anderson is one of billions of humans connected to the Matrix, unaware that the world he lives in is a virtual reality.  In his legitimate activities, he is a quiet programmer for the “respectable software company” Meta Cortex; but he is also a computer hacker who penetrates computer systems illicitly and steals information under his hacker alias “Neo”. During his time as a hacker, Anderson has learned about something known only as “The Matrix”. With Morpheus’s help Neo is rescued in the real world.
–    Smith (Agent) is not a human. He is a sentient program, a virtual person, the product of Artificial Intelligence. He lives in the Matrix and his job is to monitor, find and destroy intruders like Morpheus and Trinity. He knows the whole truth, that the Matrix is a trap and a simulation. He hates human beings and is unhappy with his life.
–    Trinity: She is the Second Ranking Officer in the Nebuchadnezzar. Morpheus is like a father to her. Trinity is a computer programmer and a hacker who has escaped from the Matrix. Though few specifics are revealed about her previous life inside the Matrix, we are told that she cracked a database so secure that she is famous amongst hackers. Morpheus identified her and helped her escape from the program into the real world. At the beginning of the series, she is Nebuchadnezzar’s first mate and serves mainly as a go-between Morpheus and the individuals he wishes to free from the Matrix. As the series progresses she develops a close relationship with Neo and falls in love with him. She is skilled with computers, at operating vehicles both inside and outside the Matrix, and in martial arts.

These four characters have special skills, very superior of the skills of even the other free people hacking in the Matrix. They can fly in a way that impress all the people who see them do it. Obviously they are different.

–    Ajax is the Captain of the hovercraft Icharus
–    Apoc is a crew member of the Nebuchadnezzar. He drove Neo to his first meeting with Morpheus. He and Switch are portrayed as front-line soldiers while inside the Matrix, acting as “point” and “rear guard” in their escape from the Agents and police and laying down covering fire as they make their way into the sewers. Cypher murders Apoc by pulling his jack out of his head while Apoc is connected to the Matrix.
–    Architect (The) is a Sentient Program whose purpose is to build (rebuild) The Matrix. He already built six of them. He cannot be human as he is hundred of years old; moreover he admit that he is not at the end of the last movie, ‘The Revolution’, when he promises to let all the slaves who want to go to the free world to escape the Matrix.
–    Ballard was the captain of the Zion hovercraft Caduceus in the film The Matrix Reloaded. During the Captains’ meeting, following Morpheus request, Ballard volunteers to stay behind although all hovercrafts have been recalled to Zion that is threatened by an army of Sentinels. He does this to await a message from The Oracle. Ballard met with the Oracle, retrieved her message and the crew of the Caduceus eventually made it back to Zion and gave the message to Neo.
–    Bane was a crew member of the hovercraft Caduceus in the films The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. While waiting to leave the Matrix with a message from The Oracle, Bane was attacked by Smith, now a dangerous, viral rogue program bent on destroying both humans and the machines using his cloning ability.
–    Beautiful Woman appears in The Matrix Reloaded in the scene where Neo, Trinity and Morpheus meet the Merovingian in his restaurant, “Le Vrai”. The Merovingian tells them about his theory of cause and effect, action and reaction. To demonstrate his point, he sends a slice of chocolate cake to a beautiful woman eating there. The cake is actually a program that causes her to have an intense and embarrassing orgasm. Afterward, she leaves and is not seen again. The Merovingian meets her later in the restroom for a tryst; although it is not initially clear that he leaves for this purpose, Persephone, his wife, is aware of his intentions and subsequently leads Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity to the Keymaker.
–    Cas is the widow of the Nebuchadnezzar’s former pilot Dozer. She lives in Zion with their two young children. She also spends time with her sister-in-law Zee, and maintains friendly rapport with Zee’s husband Link.
–    Choi is assumedly a blue pill who appears in the first movie buying illegal software from Neo, for which Choi pays $US 2,000 in cash. Choi, his latex-clad girlfriend Dujour, and several unnamed and unspeaking friends arrive at Neo’s door after he had been mysteriously told to “follow the white rabbit”. When Neo notices that Dujour has a tattoo of a white rabbit on the back of her left shoulder, he accepts their offer to go with them to a goth club, where he is approached by Trinity. Going to the club and subsequently waking up late for work the following day set the stage for the rest of the film.
–    Cypher is an important character in The Matrix. Agent Smith addresses him as Mr. Reagan. In the first film, Cypher is a crew member on Morpheus’ hovercraft, the Nebuchadnezzar. Cypher has grown tired of the Man/Machine war within the real world. Harshly disillusioned with the grim existence of living on a hovercraft and tired of following Morpheus and his blind faith in the Prophecy, he has begun to wish that he had never learned the truth and left the Matrix in the first place. This prompts him to strike a deal with the Agents. At the beginning of the movie, he nearly has Trinity killed by allowing Agent Smith to trace one of their phone calls, proving to the Agents that he, “the informant”, was legitimate. Cypher secretly meets with Agent Smith once more, agreeing to turn Morpheus over to them if the Agents will take Cypher back in the Matrix, rich and famous, with no recollection of the Matrix’s true nature. Cypher helped the Agents to ambush the crew at their safe location by dropping his Nokia 8110 phone containing useful information into a waste container after Neo enters into a car to be taken to The Oracle. Mouse is killed in the ambush. Back in the hovercraft he murders Apoc, Switch and Dozer and wounds Tank. Before he can kill Neo or Trinity, however, Tank recovers and kills Cypher.
–    Dozer is the pilot of the Nebuchadnezzar.  Dozer and his younger brother Tank have been born in the real world, in Zion, and are therefore unable to enter The Matrix. Dozer acts as the pilot and co-coordinator of the Nebuchadnezzar and makes moonshine in his spare time. Dozer is slain when Cypher kills him with a lightning gun. Dozer was married to Cas and had two young children in Zion. Also living in Zion was his sister Zee. After his death, Zee’s husband Link took the job of operator of the Nebuchadnezzar to respect Dozer’s wishes.
–    Ghost is the guns specialist of the Logos ship. Ghost is described as an “ascetic Buddhist killer”. A student of philosophy, he quotes and/or refers to Hume, William James, Nietzsche and especially Kierkegaard. Ghost and Trinity refer to each other as brother and sister, as they were unplugged from the Matrix on the same day. Ghost’s romantic feelings for Trinity are unrequited, since she is in love with Neo. Ghost is known to be the best gunner in the fleet.
–    Hamann (Councilor), by his own account to Neo, was freed at age eleven and serves as a Councilor for Zion. Hamann holds a disdain for Commander Lock’s strictly militia-minded policies and secretly supports Morpheus’ belief that Neo is the One. Although he does not directly voice these beliefs, Hamann allows the Nebuchadnezzar to leave Zion to contact the Oracle. Hamann explains this to Lock with the statement that he “believes their survival depends on more than just how many ships (they) have”, openly demonstrating his disagreement with Lock’s reliance on brute force. He enjoys visiting Zion’s engineering level, where all of their machines keep their water, oxygen, electricity and heat going. He and Neo visit the engineering level and discuss what the real meaning of control is. Hamann tells Neo that he trusts him and that he fears for the people still trapped in the Matrix.
–    Jue appears in the Animatrix film “Final Flight of the Osiris”. She was a crew member of the Osiris, and shared an intimate sexual bond with her superior, Captain Thaddeus. She went inside the Matrix to warn Zion of the approaching Sentinel Army. She died seconds after completing this mission when the Osiris was destroyed.
–    Kid (The) (Michael Karl Popper) is an exile appearing in The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Animatrix short, “Kid’s Story”. In The Animatrix, the Kid is an individual connected to the Matrix who is aided by Neo to escape to Zion. The circumstances of his liberation from the Matrix are unusual; after purposely allowing himself to fall from the top of his school building; he seems to detach himself from the Matrix before he hits the ground.
–    Link is Zion-born and married to Zee. After his brother-in-law Dozer is killed by the traitor Cypher, Link takes over the functions of operator and pilot of the Nebuchadnezzar out of respect for a promise he made to Dozer. Zee, after “losing two brothers to that ship” feels strongly that Link should find another ship to serve. She repeatedly tells Link that his captain Morpheus is crazy and that because the Nebuchadnezzar spends more time out of Zion than the rest of the fleet, she and Link spend too little time together. Link does not share Zee’s religious views; but when the Nebuchadnezzar leaves Zion to meet the Oracle, Link accepts to wear Zee’s prayer chain as a lucky charm.
–    Lock was born in Zion –and for this reason could not go into The Matrix- and the Commander of the hovercraft fleet. Most of the hovercraft Captain and crew were born in the Matrix and were rescued into the real world after taking the Red Pill. His unfamiliarity with the Matrix limited his views and led him to use any and all resources at his command to evade Machine forces and keep Zion’s whereabouts a secret. He was at odds with not only the Zion Council when managing the defences, but with some ship captains, especially Captain Morpheus of the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar. He appears to be bureaucratic, taciturn, unimaginative, and uncharismatic; as a result, he is not highly respected by either his subordinates or by the Council.
–    Maggie is a crew member on the Mjolnir (nicknamed Hammer). She appears to be the ship’s medical officer. She first appears at the end of Reloaded, tending to the unconscious Neo and Bane. While attempting to inject Bane/Smith with something to “help him remember”, Bane stabs her with a scalpel, killing her, and then escapes to the Logos. Given her name, she may be one of the few rebels other than Lock to have a real name as opposed to an alias or handle.
–    Mifune (Captain) is the head of Zion’s Armoured Personnel Unit. He is seen in The Matrix Reloaded and in The Matrix Revolutions. The character of Captain Mifune could be seen as a reference to late Japanese actor Toshirō Mifune. In Revolutions before he leads his APU into battle with the Sentinels he boosts the morale of his troops by saying, “If it’s our time to die, it’s our time. All I ask is, if we have to give these bastards our lives, we give ’em hell before we do!
–    Mouse is the youngest crew member of the Nebuchadnezzar and a programmer of the virtual reality training simulation program. He is the creator of the program “Woman in the Red Dress”, which is used as a distraction in part of Neo’s training. He is a very eager young man, excited to see the possibility that Neo could be ‘The One’ to end the war. He also appears to be something of a hedonist, as he offers the “Woman in the Red Dress” to Neo and later says, “To deny our impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human”. As Agent-led SWAT team members storm the building used by Neo and the others as an entry/exit point, Mouse attempts to stop their initial approach wielding dual automatic shotguns but is killed by the police.
–    Oracle (The) is a fictional character in The Matrix. In the first film, she is a mysterious but powerful figure, incongruously depicted as a cheerful old lady who smokes cigarettes and bakes cookies. She possesses the power of foresight, which she uses to advise and guide the humans attempting to fight the Matrix. Later, she is revealed to be a sapient program that is integral to the very nature of the Matrix itself. Whether her power of prediction is deterministic or not is a concept given much treatment in all three films. In the end it becomes clear that her power cannot be used to predict the ultimate consequences of Neo, who possesses free will when he defies the Architect.
–    Rhineheart is Thomas Anderson’s boss at the software company Metacortex. In the morning after going to a night club with Choi and Dujour  Neo arrives late at work and has to face his boss. Rhineheart, in a single monologue, foreshadows many of the film’s yet unrevealed aspects. “You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken. This company is one of the top software companies in the world because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole. Thus, if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem. The time has come to make a choice, Mr. Anderson. Either you choose to be at your desk on time, from this day forth, or you choose to find yourself another job. Do I make myself clear?”
–    Roland is the captain of the hovercraft Mjolnir (nicknamed the Hammer), the biggest hovercraft of the Zion fleet. In order to surprise the Sentinel-army in a pre-emptive strike, Commander Jason Lock ordered six ships to create a frontline to ambush the machines. Because of the immense size and weight of the Mjolnir, Captain Roland and his team arrive ‘too late’ at the frontline. They discovered that an EMP was triggered before they could get into position, deactivating all other ships, leaving them and their crews to be destroyed by Sentinels. When the Hammer’s crew searched for survivors, they found only Bane, a crewmember of the Caduceus, who was unconscious but alive.
–    Seraph is the name of a fictional character which guards the Oracle.
–    Shimada is Kid’s second-in-command of the organization E Pluribus Neo. Not much is revealed about her, but it is stated in an in-game biography that the two are close friends since Kid’s awakening. Shimada has a penchant for using flowery metaphors to reflect the depth of her dedication to Neo’s ideals of self-awareness, freedom, and peace. It is assumed that she acts as a controller for the EPN operatives. Shimada has been killed by Veil via the removal of the cranial jack while she was jacked inside the Matrix.
–    Smith was an agent in a team hunting and destroying any humans entering the Matrix. He took over Bane’s mind and when the Caduceus operator called to take Bane out of the Matrix, Smith took its place and moved into the real world of Zion. During his time in Zion, Bane/Smith is shown cutting himself with a knife (thereby experiencing human pain for the first time) and later approaching Neo in an attempt to stab him before he can board the Nebuchadnezzar and leave Zion. This murder attempt is aborted as Neo’s attention was drawn in his direction by the approach of Kid, who came to see Neo.
–    Sparks is the operator and general-purpose crewmember of the Logos (over crew include captain and ship’s pilot, Niobe; weapons expert and first mate Ghost). His sarcastic and irreverent demeanour serves to alleviate the sometimes tense situations aboard the Logos. Sparks does care about the other two members of the Logos and he is frequently exasperated at their actions. He also seems to want a quiet life, as indicated when he cries “Oh when…When will it end?!”
–    “Spoon Boy” is one of the children Neo meets when he first goes to meet the Oracle. In her apartment Neo is left waiting in a room where some children are manipulating inanimate objects with their minds; they are introduced to him as “the other potentials”. One boy is reading a Chinese book, a girl is playing chess and another girl is working on her computer. Two girls are floating toy blocks. One of the kids is bending spoons; He has a clean-shaven head and is dressed in the traditional garb of a Buddhist monk and he speaks with an Australian accent; he imparts some philosophical statements to Neo:
. Spoon Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon; that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
. Neo: What truth?
. Spoon Boy: There is no spoon.
. Neo: There is no spoon?
. Spoon Boy: Then you will see, it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
. Neo then takes one of the boy’s spoons, and is able to telekinetically bend it himself.
–    Switch was a member of the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar in the first film. Switch and Apoc are portrayed as front-line soldiers while inside the Matrix, acting as “point” and “rear guard” in their escape from the Agents and police and providing covering fire as they make their way into the sewers. Switch also pokes fun at Mouse, calling him “the digital pimp”. Switch was killed when her body left in the hovercraft was ‘unjacked’ by Cypher while her mind was still in the Matrix. Cypher betrayed the crew in an attempt to return to the Matrix as a permanent resident himself.
–    Tank watched over not only the jacked-in crewmembers, but also the ship itself in case the Sentinel killing machines attacked the ship. Like all Operators, Tank was a skilled programmer who could provide jacked-in crewmembers almost anything they needed and guided them to and from dangerous events within the Matrix. Unlike his crewmates (Apoc, Switch, Mouse, Cypher, Trinity, Captain Morpheus, and Neo) neither Tank nor his older brother Dozer were grown artificially in the Machine’s human harvest fields for insertion in the Matrix powerplant. They were born in the real world. As a result, Tank and Dozer don’t have the various jacks and connectors in their bodies as the other humans born within the Matrix.
–    Thadeus is the captain of the hovercraft Osiris. He has an intimate relationship with Jue, an officer aboard the Osiris. He and Jue are duelling erotically in a training program when the Osiris receives an incoming sentinel alert. They exit the training program and hesitantly bring the ship up to the planet’s surface, where they witness the numerous machines getting ready to attack Zion. The ship is quickly spotted and attacked. In the final minutes before the ship is destroyed, Thadeus plugs Jue into the Matrix to deliver a message informing Zion about the menacing Machine army. He, Jue and the rest of the ship’s crew are killed when the sentinels destroy the ship but the message has been sent.
–    Tyndall was awakened and removed from the Matrix at a young age and spent her formative adolescent years in Zion. When she came of age, Tyndall eagerly became a Zion operative in the Matrix. She served capably during the War, working her way up to a senior position, but retired from field duty in the aftermath of an accident that rendered her unable to jack into the Matrix safely any longer
–    Zee is a native Zionite who experienced the pain of losing her brothers Dozer and Tank, both of whom were killed while serving aboard the Nebuchadnezzar. Unbeknownst to her, Zee’s husband Link had a pact with Dozer that he would take over as Operator on the Neb should anything happen to Dozer. It’s a constant thorn in the side of their marriage, with Zee demanding that Link switch to another ship, and Link refusing to break his promise to his wife’s deceased brother. Ultimately, Zee supports her husband’s decision, and even takes up arms in the defence of Zion against the invading Machine army, attempting to stop the diggers with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.

–    Agent Brown
–    Agent Jones

List of hovercrafts:

–    Avatar
–    Brahma: Captain, Kali
–    Blue Dreamer: Captain, Cryptos; First mate, Veil; Other crew: Barakoa, Viraconrida, Festaneve, Khursun, Exivy,
–    Rejex, Stanten, and Kerevola (Recursion); Tranta, Haigen, Itarrot, Esime and Recant (Syntax); Maruth, Sphectra,
–    Dreami, Sutola and Liparus (Vector)
–    Caduceus: Captain, Ballard; First mate, Malachi; Other crew, Bane
–    Calappidae: Operator Parr, Red; Other crew: Maggie, Rollins, Lena
–    Devildog: Captain, Fenshire; First mate, Symmetric; Pilot, Raddclif; Operator, Fuses
–    Ganesha
–    Gnosis: Captain, Ice; Operator, possibly Jacob; Other crew: Corrupt, Wurm, and Jacob
–    Icharus: Captain, Ajax
–    Logos: Captain, Niobe; First mate, Ghost; Pilot, Niobe; Operator, Sparks
–    Logos II: Captain, Niobe; First mate, Ghost; Pilot, Niobe; Operator; Sparks; Other crew: Soluma and Amithist
–    Mariner; Operator, Rook; Other crew: Deuce, Speedy, Rocket
–    Mjolnir (“Hammer”); Captain, Roland; First mate, Colt; Pilot, AK; Operator, AK; Other crew: Maggie, Mauser
–    (Vector server liaison), Caelifera, Merrit, and Rylet (Recursion server liaisons), Harkee (Syntax server
–    liaison),
–    Nabonidus; Captain, Morpheus; Pilot, Possibly Morpheus
–    Nebuchadnezzar (“Neb”); Captain, Morpheus; First mate, Trinity; Pilot: Dozer, Link; Operator: Tank, Link;
–    Other crew: Apoc, Cypher, Mouse, Neo, Switch
–    Neo’s Hope; Captain, Kid; First mate, Shimada; Pilot, Unknown (May be filled by Shimada); Operator, Unknown
–    (may be filled by Shimada); other crew: Reposco and roolith (Recursion liaisons) Fuscienne and Catalyn (Syntax
–    liaisons), Adenias (Syntax crew member), Pentothal (Vector liaison)
–    Novalis; Captain, Tirant
–    Novalis II; Captain, Sawayaka; First mate, WanNi; Pilot, Neurophyte; Operator, Tamarin; Other crew: Vashuo,
–    Lelan, Toorima, Oniyuzu, Odran, Al3xandra
–    Osiris; Captain, Thadeus; First mate, Jue; Pilot, Robbie; Operator, Robbie; Other crew: Five others, names
–    unknown
–    Pequod; Captain, Flint
–    Polaris; Other crew, Nova
–    Prometheus
–    Saltpillar; Captain, Neoteny; First mate, Wanzer; Pilot, Microcoulomb; Operator, Wanzer; Other crew:
–    Ryumanjisen, Shinte
–    Scanline; other crew: Strayshot, Acheronia, Theptism, Trifid (Recursion), Alethiana, Daxil, Derouter, Leton,
–    Runtrace (Syntax), Betzalel, Kaveri, Palliate (Vector), Hynek (Recursion)
–    Shiva
–    Vigilant; Captain, Soren; First mate, Vector; Pilot, Unknown (Maybe Jax); Operator, Jax; Other crew: Axel,
–    Binary
–    Vishnu

It was later revealed that the Morpheus RSI making appearances across The Matrix was in fact a simulacrum created by The General in hopes of deceiving his followers into thinking he had in fact returned. The General was defeated by the Morpheus Sim and escaped to the shadows once again.

3.1 Animatrix

The nine short stories survey the idea of the Matrix from different angles. It was released in 2003.

3.1.1 Last flight of the Osiris

There is really little to understand while watching ‘The Last Flight of the Osiris’. This short story unleashes the second motion picture, ‘Reloaded’. ‘The Last Flight of the Osiris’ is about detachment, but it’s also about freedom.

At the beginning a couple of humans –Thadeus, Captain of the military hovercraft Osiris, and his senior crewmember, Jue- are ‘training’ in martial arts and flirting with each other. Because they used to be slaves they have those plugs in the back of their heads, and by reconnecting them, they can still re-enter into the Matrix. This training was also a way to enjoy themselves. They are relaxing inside the Matrix computer program which allows them to do things, like jumping and flying in the air that they could not do as ordinary human beings.

They are called out of their virtual simulation environment because their hovercraft is in danger. The hovercraft operator tells them the bad news: 250,000 machines from the Matrix (sentinels) are around. The hovercraft flees towards Junction 21, takes an uncharted tunnel where they encounter another group of sentinels that attacks them. They destroy the enemy machines with their guns.

When Osiris gets out of the tunnel they are four kilometres above Zion, the only subterranean human town left. The 250,000 machines are there using giant drills to drill holes into the Earth’s core directly in the direction of Zion. The sentinels notice Osiris and attack it.

Zion is unaware of the danger ahead and must be told that they are under attack. The Captain of the Osiris hovercraft and his girlfriend make the decision to send her into the Matrix to drop a package containing a message alerting Zion of the attack. To do this Jue has to be put to sleep to allow her mind to enter the Matrix. Jue lands on a roof top in the Matrix, jumps/flies around, and drops the package into the mail box linked to Zion. That package will arrive at its destination and somebody from the free world will receive the message.

The Osiris doesn’t send a phone/radio message directly to Zion or to another hovercraft because it is too dangerous. The machines could intersect the message or find the positions of the other hovercrafts. So instead they sent the Jue into the Matrix to drop the message in an old fashion mail box.

After posting the message Jue tries to contact Thadeus to be taken back but at that moment Osiris is destroyed by the sentinels and all the crew is killed. Jue, still in the Matrix, drops dead without an apparent reason. Her mind can’t live without the body. For Jue this was like dying of smoke inhalation while sleeping. Her mind was inside the Matrix, but her body was destroyed by the sentinels.

All the hovercraft electrical power was needed to send Jue into the Matrix and the warning message to Zion. The ship could not use its Electro Magnetic Pulse weapon to neutralize the enemies because it would have turned off their computers and this would have killed Jue before she could post the package. However the machines were able to destroy Osiris.

3.1.2 Second renaissance – Part 1

At one time men built machines (or robots) to facilitate their daily life. These machines, designed to look like them, behaved like human beings; they were based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). For a long period of time they did the men’s work –especially the manual and repetitive work- without complaining, happy to serve the people. As a result most people did not have to do any hard work anymore and, consequently, they became lazy, arrogant and corrupt.

Although useful to the people, the machines were not respected for what they did. They were in fact treated like sub-humans, even if they were behaving more and more like their Masters, the human beings.

Around 2090, a machine, an abused domestic worker named B1-66ER, revolted against its owner. Curiously, the name of the robot is ‘B-166-ER’, which is a way of spelling ‘Bigger’. The robot was going to be turned off and destroyed because its master wanted to replace it by a new more efficient model. It refused to ‘die’ and killed its owner, his pets, and the technician charged to deactivate it. B-166ER was arrested and put on trial. When brought to court he pleaded self defence; “he did not want to die” because it believed that he was a real human too (like Pinocchio wanting to be a real boy). The prosecutor said that the machines had not the same rights as the human beings and that their owners had the right to destroy them at will. The defence argued that the robots, behaving like humans, should be judged as person and not as machines. B1-66ER was condemned to be destroyed loosing its plea to be kept alive.

The other robots heard the news on how B1-66ER was put to death and, together with their human sympathisers, complained that B1-66ER did not get a fair trial and rioted in the streets of the cities. The human leaders and their governments, fearing a robot rebellion, decided to destroy all of them. They used all the power at their disposal to crush the rioters. Most of them died and were buried in common graves. It was very ugly. There was a kind of religious fervour behind the humans exterminating the artificial intelligence robots that they had created to use as slaves.

Some machines survived but were expelled from the human world. They built their own town -which they called Zero.One (0.1)- in the “Cradle of Civilization” (possibly in Africa?) and they lived completely separated from the humans. However, due to their AI they soon adapted themselves to their new situation, rebuilt their economy, drew their own laws and started to manufacture all the goods that the humans still needed. Soon the two communities were trading together on a high scale, the robots producing cheap, reliable, mass-produced goods that undercut the human economy. The machine world prospered while the human society was declining. Soon the credits agencies took note of the reality, the human world rating went down and the machine world’s went up.

The humans were, of course, unhappy but they refused the machines’ offer to negotiate an agreement and collaborate. The United Nations declared an economic and naval blockade of 0.1. However the machine world was now very powerful and wanted to be treated as such. They sent two Ambassadors the United Nations, one carrying an apple in its hand, to ask for full membership offering in exchange to settle the crisis peacefully. Their request was denied and the Ambassadors were thrown out and perhaps killed. It was obvious that something would soon change and that the robots would be back. Meanwhile the Security Council debated a possible war on the Machine World.

3.1.3 Second renaissance – Part 2

The United Nations attacked Zero.One with nuclear bombs devastating the city. However they did not destroy all the machines and, being mechanical, they suffered less to radiation and heat than the humans. The machines fought back; their army was moving in all directions and occupying more and more of the human territory.

By that time only the machines were manufacturing the industrial goods needed by the lazy humans who had relied on 0.1 since already a long time, producing nothing or very little themselves. As the robots were taking over more and more human land, the people military leaders thought of a solution. At a political and military summit they approved a plan codenamed “Operation Dark Storm” that aimed to cut the machines off from the sun, their primary energy source.

Around 2095 bombers dispersed a viscous liquid (or was it nano-machines) in the air to cover the sky impeding the sun rays to reach the earth. The sun disappeared from view and the earth was completely in the dark. At the same time the human armies launched a ground offensive. Some of the human weapons were also disabled by the lack of sun light so the war was mainly a fight between the two infantries. Both sides suffered heavy loss.

In O.1 they produced improved robots no longer human-like –now looking like insects, animals, large beasts, mythical creatures- and they called them Sentinels. The initial humanoid robots were destroyed in their majority and 0.1 lost its near-human aspect. As it was obvious that the machines were winning the war, the United Nations put its last hope in launching atomic bombs on the machines but they also killed many humans. The war ended, and the remaining human population was taken prisoner by the machines. The UN Security Council and the machine Ambassadors signed an armistice. Immediately afterwards the machines dropped an atomic bomb on the United Nations building killing most of the human leaders and destroying New York City.

By now the world was in complete ruins. The machines were unable to remove the Dark Storm shroud and the absence of the sun caused an ecological disaster that came in addition to the total destruction.

Finally the machines created a computer program to feed a virtual reality similar to what they knew in the prisoners’ brains. In this way the prisoners were happy although they were kept sedated in vats after the memory of their previous life had been erased. The machines used the renewable bioelectrical, thermal and kinetic energy of the human prisoners to replace the sun as their energy source. In this way a new symbiotic relationship was created between the two communities, the prisoners were now the machines’ batteries.

3.1.4 A Kid’s Story

The main character, the kid, will appear again in the films! He is a very important part of at least two of the three motion pictures and will stay in the story to the end. His name, ‘Michael Karl Popper’, is a clue to be remembered!

‘A Kid’s Story’ is happening inside the Matrix. Popper, a disaffected teenager, is growing aware that something is wrong within his world. But as he lives in a simulation of the year 1999 he is not capable to draw analogies as to what are the causes of such anomalies.

The kid is asleep and dreaming about falling peacefully and experimenting the normal gravity laws, the friction of the air on his body and seeing the landscape from that angle. It was like a loose piece of a puzzle that does not mean anything at that time. When he wakes up he has the impression that he is more real when dreaming that when he is while awake. He is now wondering if his senses are lying to him, but he has no way to know the truth. He sends a message on his computer: ‘Somebody tells me why I feel more real when I dream that when I am awake’. Strange enough Neo answers: “To know the truth, you must risk everything”. This is ambiguous and it confuses him more. He really feels alone.

Michael goes to school on his roller blades. The teacher is writing on the black board and Popper mobile phone rings. The teacher is not happy and tells him off. The phone rings a second time and the teacher is quite angry. However Popper opens the phone and listens. Neo tells him that “They”, the Matrix Security agents, are coming for him and that he must get out. The agents have found that he is in touch with Neo and that means that he wants to escape to the real world.

The kid makes a wild escape on his rolling blades even going in the women toilet from where he climbs on the drain pipe to reach the top of the building. When he reaches the roof he finds that “They”, many men in black, are waiting for him. Trusting Neo he says ‘Neo, I believe’ then he let go and falls down.

His funeral takes place in the Matrix under a heavy rain. Noble eulogies are being said but, in fact, nobody really understands why Popper killed himself. The explanations given are that it is a self-defence mechanism, denying reality, or a mental delusion common for this kind of kids. The conclusion is that he is now in the ‘real world, somewhere else.

He reappears in the human world where he wakes up and resuscitates a rare case of self-substantiation. He was not alone anymore. He tells Neo “You saved me” and Neo answers “Kid, you saved yourself”.

Notes: In this story the Kid was making a kind of experiment. He committed suicide by falling from the roof of the school building but he did not die because the ordinary laws of physique did not apply in the Matrix. He was not really falling and, being inside the Matrix, he was in charge of his mind and able to avoid the part of the simulation that was meant to kill him. Of course he was a special case as, even being a slave in the Matrix, he knew that the laws of physics were not real. He was able to violate them and resuscitate in the free world.

3.1.5 Program

Armed horsemen –looking like Japanese Samurais- are galloping in a field pursuing a woman on a white horse. They are throwing lances at her, but she avoids being hit. She kills one of the horsemen and the others seem to collapse in dust.

The white haired woman –Cis- was kept prisoner in the Matrix but she escaped to Zion, the real/human world. Being an ex-prisoner she can reconnect herself to the Matrix computer. It is what she has done and the fight with the horsemen takes place in the Matrix.

A lone Samurai known to Cis appears. His name is Duo and he is in fact her lover. The two are battling for fun to test their fighting ability. At one point Duo disarms Cis and questions her concentration. He wonders if she lost because she is sorry she left the Matrix after accepting to swallow the red pill. They go on fighting and this time she overpowers him.

Duo says that he has something to tell her. She thinks that he will propose marriage but instead he tells her that he wants to go back into the Matrix and that he longs to have an ordinary and free life. He also tells her that he has cut off all the communication tools they have so they can talk freely and nobody will hear what they say.

The woman does not like what he says and tells him she does not want to leave the world of the humans. Her main argument is that after leaving the Matrix they have learned the truth so they cannot go back. Duo does not care any more for the harsh life in the human world and insist he wants to live a normal life with her in the Matrix and forget everything they learned in the human world. He adds that he is certain that the machines can make them forget the truth.

They go on fighting, even more fiercely, and he informs her that everything is organised and that “they” are coming to help them escape. She is afraid and tries to ask the operator to take her out of this predicament but he reminds her that all the communication systems are disconnected. He gives her a last chance: or she goes back with him to the Matrix or else … She still refuses to go with him so he tells her he is going to kill her. But as they go on fighting it is her who kills him although she admits she loves him.

She comes out of the Matrix computer control and wakes up in the real world where she is told that all she went through was a training test. She is told that she did well. She is upset and hits the technician who remarks that “except for the last part” she passed the test.

3.1.6 World Record

At the beginning a voice says: “Only the most exceptional people become aware of the Matrix. Those who do must possess a rare degree of intuition, sensitivity, and a questioning nature. However, very rarely, some people gain this wisdom through wholly different means”. These people can see and identify inconsistencies in the Matrix. This story runs inside the Matrix, the athlete in connected to and controlled by the computer, and four agents are monitoring him.

Dan Davis is a ‘100 meters’ athlete competing in the Olympic Games. He was a world record holder having run a 100 metres race in 8’’99. But later on he was disqualified because they found that he used drugs. He wants to run again and beat his old world record just to “prove them wrong”.

His father and a young woman reporter believe that he can do it but his trainer, after Dan won the qualifying heat, tells him that now he is not fit to run again and, if he does, he will hurt himself and never run again. Dan insists he will run and the trainer resigns and leaves him. The woman reporter is following the athlete closely and interviews him before the race but she cannot get much out of him. He only says that he is feeling good and is confident he can do it, adding that running makes him feel free.

Four agents are monitoring him and when the race starts Dan is going strong. Soon one can see that the athlete’s leg muscles are strained to the maximum. Finally they break and he is getting behind the other competitors. Through strong willpower Dan get himself free of the computer controlling him and goes on running ignoring the injury. He overtakes the other competitors and wins the race breaking his own world record (8’’72) even although the agents try to stop him. After the finishing line the computer regains control. Dan enjoyed freedom for a short period of time, but now he is a prisoner again.

He is now a cripple in a hospital taken around in a wheelchair by a beautiful talkative nurse. In the background we hear the agent’s voice saying: “It was an interesting case and there was nothing to be concerned about. The athlete memory of the race has been expunged with no residual effect. However he will never run or walk again. He will be monitored for sometime but there should not be any problem. The record will live in people’s mind for a long time. So what can one ask more?”

Dan whispers the word ‘free’ angering the agents who tell him to sit back. At that point the athlete breaks the chains securing him to the wheelchair, get up, walk a few steps, fall again and is put back in the wheelchair by the nurse. The computer is controlling him again. He will not be an issue for the Matrix.

3.1.7 Beyond (The haunted house)

This takes place again inside the Matrix.

In a big Japanese town a lot of people wait to cross a busy road intersection. Usually when one of the lights goes green some people cross one road while the others have a red light and have to wait. Here all the people cross all the roads at the same time in complete confusion. A room full of computers control the traffic but the operators know that something must have gone wrong.

A girl, Yoko, is lying on her bed talking to a friend on her mobile; at the same time since it is feeding time she is calling her cat, Yuki. The cat normally comes back in the house on its own at feeding time but not today. Instead it goes further away. The girl is worried, stops the phone call, and goes out looking for Yuki asking people if they have seen it. Nobody has seen it but some boys suggest that it could have gone to the ‘haunted house’. In fact the house is not haunted, it only appears so because there are some inconsistencies in the Matrix computer.

Yoko, like everybody else in the Matrix, is run by the computer. She has a feeling that something is wrong and she decides to have a look inside the “haunted house”. The girl walks around in the “haunted house” but she does not see her cat. Instead she sees strange things such as:
–    Queer animals
–    It is raining through a hole in the roof in a part of the house while it is sunny outside.
–    Cans are floating in the air.
–    Doors that go nowhere.
–    Boys are throwing glass bottles on the floor breaking them, but they come whole again on their own
–    Broken light bulbs that produce light
–    Time seems to slow down.
–    Boys can jump in the air
–    Suddenly the walls are shaking as if there was an earthquake and the girl falls on the floor.

Finally Yoko finds her cat and picks it up. A Chinese girl comes to talk to our friend while boys are jumping down from the top floor of the house but their falls stop before they could be hurt hitting the ground. However one boy’s nose is bleeding. Other strange things happen and Yoko has again a feeling that something is wrong:
– She sees a dove’s feather looking like a butterfly rotating in front of her.
– A dove flies then stops in the air.
– A girl falls on the floor then appears to float freely in the air.
– All the other children follow her and float in the air.

Obviously the authorities are aware that there are some problems; a big lorry is on its way to deal with them. A team of “rodent exterminators” throw the children and the animals out of the house. Our friend stays behind because her cat has disappeared again but she finally finds it. She is then carried out and the workers can do their job.

Next day the children come back but the house is not there anymore and in its place there is now a parking lot. The boys and the girl try to repeat what they did the day before but without success. Yoko pick-up an empty can of cat food, cut herself, and seems to bleed to death.

Conclusion

Yoko, the girl who is looking for her cat in the ‘Haunted House’, understands that something is wrong. But as she, and the others in the story, live in a simulation of the year 1999 they are not able to draw analogies as to what are the causes of such anomalies.

What is happening is that there is an anomaly in the program and, as a result, the simulated environment is broken! It is like when we visit a website and the links are ‘broken’. When we click on a link and the link goes nowhere, or when we are unable to watch a video or to watch a photo because there is a problem with our internet browser or a flash application, or things of that nature. So whatever seems to violate the laws of physics is just broken codes in the program. The Laws of Physics inserted in the program that controls The Matrix are such that time is still, but the humans continue to live without suspecting it! However now and then something ‘violates’ those Laws of Physics, the codes are @broken’ and strange things happen.

3.1.8 A detective story

In the Matrix world, a man, the detective Mr Ash, is lighting a cigarette with a cigarette lighter and saying “A case to End all Cases”.

Mr Ash is without work, money and even food. While talking to his cat, Dinah, he receives a phone call from someone asking him to find a hacker known as Trinity. The caller –obviously a Matrix World agent- refuses to tell his name and the detective is ready to refuse the job until the caller tells him to watch his bank account on the computer; a deposit of $800,000 has just been made and, of course, Mr Ash accepts the job.

Trinity’s name is known in the hacker circle as she is very good; nobody knows who she really is, or where she lives. The police have been looking for her for a long time but she is always a step ahead of them. The detective job will not be easy. Other detectives have been on the case before but they ended badly. The first killed himself, the second disappeared, and the third went mad. Mr Ash goes to talk to the creasy one. This sick man lives in a poor room that has a checker board floor; on the wall it is written “Find the Red Queen”. The mad man says that Trinity does not exist, she is not real and she is a figment, a cipher, a jabberwocky. The crazy man ends the conversation by asking himself “Who am I?” Mr Ash did not get anything useful from him.

The detective goes on looking in the hackers’ hang outs and, somewhere, he finds a trail while thinking about the book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. Using sentences from this book he sends a computer message to the Red Queen saying that he is looking for Trinity and adding that he was told that Trinity is “Through the Looking Glass”. Red Queen answers that it is him, Mr Ash, who is “Through the Looking Glass”. He asks to meet her. He is told he has to jump the first of the six brooks and she will be there at 20.05. The computer now goes in “Error”.

Understanding the message is not easy but Mr Ash finally realizes that “Crossing the Second Brook” would take him into the wood. He remembers that Alice jumped the first brook and then boarded a train. The detective runs to the station and climbs in the train at the last moment. Once on it he opens a compartment door where there is a young woman. He thinks he is in a trap but she tells him that there is ‘a difference between a trap and a test.’ He passes the test and the woman is impressed. He thinks she is flattering him but it is not the case. She says that she is there to save him.

She then points a kind of a gun to his left eye, and removes a bug planted by the agents in an “eye test dream”. He now realizes that he was hired as a way to get to her. Trinity walks out of the compartment but she immediately sees three agents ready to kill her. She shouts to him to follow her. They escape through the corridor under a volley of bullets; they shoot back, before hiding in the next carriage.

The agents try to take over the detective’s body; as he leans on a seat rail he seems to be stuck to it for a moment. Trinity tells Ash that, after all, he did not make it and that she is obliged to shoot him, wounding him badly. Mr Ash would like to go with her saying that he knows she is Trinity and that all that happened is his fault, “all through the looking glass”. She tells him there is a difference between a test and a choice and that she thinks he could have handled the truth better, but for him it was only a job.

They say goodbye nicely. Trinity shoots the window and escapes while the detective seems to slump in his seat. The three agents arrive but the detective deceives them by leaving only his hat on his seat while hiding in the seat across. Mr Ash points his gun at them while at the same time looking away, lighting a cigarette and saying “This was a case to end all Cases”. The agents turn to Ash who will certainly be shot dead.

3.1.9 Matriculated

Introduction
Matriculated was written and directed by Korean American director Peter Chung. Like ‘Beyond’, it is a midquel (*) of the first and second film. In this story the humans, rather than reprogramming the intelligent machines, help them to develop free will hoping they will overcome their original “search-and-destroy” programming and behave like humans too. After capturing one of the “runner” robots the rebels, as these humans are called, insert the machine into their matrix. This robot is led it to believe that it may have a relationship with one of the female rebels, Alexa, either friendship or something deeper.

Story
A group of humans living above ground on the earth attract intelligent machines from the Matrix into their laboratory where they insert them in their own Matrix. There humans teach their captive machines some of the human characteristics like compassion and empathy. Rather that reprogramming the captured machines the humans want them to develop freewill, accept to stay with the human, and change their military programming. The humans hope that once freely converted to the human way of life, the machines will help Zion in its fight against the machine-controlled totalitarianism which currently dominates the Earth.

In their Observation Centre the humans see two runner robots approaching. They inform a woman outlooker, Alexa, who attracts them in the laboratory. Before entering in it one robot drops a locator that will allow the other sentinels to know where the laboratory is. There is a fight between the two robots and a converted machine. One of the runner robot is destroyed but the other, Carl, is captured with the help of Baby, an odd monkey-like intelligent creature.

Together with the humans, Carl is inserted in the human Matrix and submitted to some mechanical changes before he can participate in the voluntary conversion process. He is stripped of his mechanical body and now he looks like the humans who, in their Matrix, look like strange humanoids similar to plastic dolls. The humans are pleased as Carl adapts himself well to its new environment. Carl has been successfully inserted in the human Matrix and soon seems to have a special relationship with Alexa although it is not clear if it is friendship or something more. This is shown by the fact that his red eyes –a symbol of the machines- are now green like the humans’. They are all enjoying themselves.

The rebel group is suddenly attacked by sentinels that found their camp with the help of the locator dropped outside by a robot (perhaps by Carl). To defend themselves the rebels –but also Carl- unplug themselves and leave their human Matrix and become fully humans. However in the fight all the humans, except Alexa, are killed and all the machines/sentinels are destroyed but Carl is still alive.

Alexa has been wounded and is dying. Carl plugs her and himself back in the human Matrix and she is alive again. But when Alexa realises that she is now alone with Carl she is screaming in horror. Carl exits from the human Matrix and sees that Alexa is dead in the real world.

The film ends with Carl, the “converted” robot, standing outside the human rebel headquarters and we see that his eyes are changing from green to red. He is back in his machine world.

Conclusions
The ‘Matriculated’ episode is very critical, thought-provoking and visceral. Basically it is a commentary on mystical experiences or cult inductions. This is a very complex argument; it is a lot like false religions! In this story, free humans outside the Matrix are brainwashing some captured machines. In due time they make the captured machines go through some sublime and loving experiences so that they ‘fall in love’ with the humans. The humans hope that these ‘converted’ machines will help them in their fight against the machines, in fact becoming traitors to their own kind.

(*) A midquel is a sequel which can take place during a chronology gap within a single previously completed work. For example, the Narnia book The Horse and His Boy takes place during the reign of the Pevensie children, which happens towards the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Another example would be the film Bambi II, which starts out shortly after the death of the young deer’s mother in Bambi but before the later scenes in which he is an adult.

3.2 The Matrix (the first film released in 1999)

3.2.1 Introduction   

The story reveals the identity of Neo, the ‘Chosen One’ or the ‘Gifted One’ found by Morpheus. While still jacked in the Matrix Neo (or better Mr Anderson) understands that he is living in an encoded virtual world. The Matrix for Neo is like a vivid dream, a dream.

After being rescued to the real world and after talking to the Oracle and seeing ‘the Source’ he can “see” the computer script, or command lines, of the program and he can manipulate the encoding to the point that he can even fly in the Matrix. As a result no other human is more powerful that Neo when he goes back in the Matrix that he can partially control.

Neo is not a stereotypical hero, he is introverted, he is not talkative and, at first as the Oracle said, he is a jittery June bug. It is not clear what he wants or what is in it for him. The rest of the story goes on telling us about the old characters (from Animatrix) and the new ones that are all very complex.

The people living in the Matrix are in fact Artificial Intelligence programs designed to look like Humans. In the Matrix they seem to have flesh, they eat, they dance, they get married, etc. However seen from outside the Matrix they are not human and their bodies are only a projection. They are like ‘Agent Smith’ but they do other tasks. These “people” behave like any human being; they live for their self-interest, as if they were ‘fallen angels’.

‘The Matrix’ is a great show dealing with a new breed of mythology, religion, Karl Popper style philosophy, and just any other aspect of the human experience. It also contains other interesting advances in the field of cognition as part of the main plot.

The free humans have developed a way to download knowledge into their people’s brains in matter of seconds. However this is only possible for those free humans who were formerly in slavery in the Matrix as they are the only ones who have a plug in the back of their heads. Those born free have no such plug so cannot do this. In this way these new free humans can have skills (such as piloting helicopters) or knowledge (the Kung Fu fighting technique) inserted in their brains. They use these abilities to thrive when they enter the Matrix although it is hostile to everyone not plugged to it permanently as a slave. Agent Smith and his colleagues’ purposes are to hunt and kill these intruders.

Only the mind of the ex-slaves living in the real world can enter into the Matrix while their bodies remain in their hovercraft, the starting point for these journeys. Inside the Matrix they seem to have human bodies but it is only a projection of their real self. To enter into the Matrix they must position their hovercrafts near enough to the crop fields (where the humans are kept in vats). Once inside they must connect themselves to the Matrix program to enter the simulation world and be able to talk to the captives. It is like wanting to access their dreams and talk to somebody who is sleeping. All slaves are kept in deep slumber, so the free humans have to enter that dream world to convince the chosen slaves to agree to leave their world before smuggling them out.

The free people are always at war with the Machines. They enter the Matrix to smuggle out slaves (in mind and body) to increase the small human population. They smuggle the person by tracing their bodies and when the Machine flushes their bodies they can go into the sewer and rescue them. To leave the Matrix the humans, as well as the new recruits, use a wireless connection known ‘broadcast distance’ which looks like an ordinary phone line.

This first movie, ‘The Matrix’ movie is followed by two others –‘Reloaded’ and ‘Revolution’- that conclude the story. They are deep in plots and characters driven.

3.2.2 The Matrix

The screen is filled with green cascading codes, which gives way to the title, The Matrix.

A phone rings and text appears on the screen: “Call trans opt: received. 2-19-98 13:24:18 REC: Log>” As a conversation takes place between Trinity and Cypher, two free humans, a table of random green numbers is being scanned and individual numbers selected, creating a series of digits not unlike an ordinary phone number. It looks as if a code is being deciphered or a call is being traced.

Trinity talks about some unknown person. Cypher taunts Trinity, suggesting she enjoys watching him. Trinity counters that “Morpheus says they may have found ‘the One’,” just as the sound of a number being selected alerts Trinity that someone may be tracing their call. She ends the call.

Armed policemen move down a darkened, decrepit hallway in the ‘Heart O’ the City Hotel’, their flashlight beam bouncing just ahead of them. They come to room 303, kick down the door and find a woman dressed in black, facing away from them. It’s Trinity. At their command, she brings her hands up from the laptop she was working on.

Outside the hotel a car drives up and three agents appear in neatly pressed black suits. They are Agent Smith, Agent Brown, and Agent Jones. Agent Smith and the police lieutenant argue. Agent Smith admonishes the policeman that, for his agents’ protection, he was given specific orders to contact the agents first. The lieutenant dismisses this and says that they can handle “one little girl” and that he has two units that are bringing her down at that very moment. Agent Smith replies: “No, Lieutenant. Your men are already dead.”

Inside, Trinity easily defeats the six policemen sent to apprehend her, using fighting and evasion techniques that seem to defy gravity. She calls Morpheus, letting him know that the line has been traced, though she doesn’t know how. Morpheus informs her that she will have to “make it to another exit,” and that Agents are heading up after her.

A fierce rooftop chase ensues with Trinity and an Agent leaping from one building to the next, astonishing the policemen left behind. Trinity makes a daring leap across an alley and through a small window. She has momentarily lost her pursuers and makes it to a public phone booth on the street level. The phone begins to ring. As she approaches it a garbage truck, driven by Agent Smith, careens towards the phone booth. Trinity makes a desperate dash to the phone, picking it up just moments before the truck smashes the booth into a brick wall. The three Agents can only see that there is no body in the wreckage. Trinity has escaped and is safe in her hovercraft.
–    “She got out,” the first agent says.
–    “The informant is real.” adds the second.
–    “We have the name of their next target,” says the third, adding “His name is Neo.”

Neo, a hacker with thick black hair and a sallow appearance, is asleep in front of his monitor. Notices about a manhunt for a man named Morpheus scroll across his screen as he sleeps. Suddenly Neo’s screen goes blank and a series of text messages appear: “Wake up, Neo.” “The Matrix has you.” “Follow the White Rabbit.” Then, the text says “Knock, knock, Neo…” just as he reads it, a knock comes at the door of his apartment, 101. It’s a group of ravers and Neo sells the leader a contraband disc he has secreted in a copy of Simulacra and Simulation. The lead raver asks him to join them and Neo demurs until he sees the tattoo of a small white rabbit on the shoulder of a seductive girl in the group.

At a rave bar Neo stands alone and aloof as the group he is with is partying. Trinity approaches him seemingly from nowhere and introduces herself. Neo recognizes her name; she became a famous hacker after she cracked the IRS database. She tells him that he is in great danger, that ‘they’ are watching him and that she knows that he is searching for answers, particularly to the most important question of all: what is the Matrix? The pulsing music of the bar gives way to the repetitious blare of Neo’s alarm clock; it is 9:18 and he’s late for work.

At his job at Metacortex, a leading software company housed in a modern high rise, Neo is berated by his boss for having a problem with authority, for thinking he’s special. Neo listens to his boss, but his attention is on the workers cleaning the window of the office. Back at his bleak cubicle Neo receives a delivery as “Thomas Anderson.” Upon opening the package he finds a cell phone which immediately rings. On the other end is Morpheus, who informs Neo that they’ve both run out of time and that “they” are coming for him. Morpheus tells him to slowly look up, toward the elevator. Agents Smith, Jones, and Brown are there, obviously looking for him, as a woman points towards Neo’s cube. Morpheus tries to guide Neo out of the building but when he is instructed to get on a scaffolding and take it to the roof Neo rejects Morpheus’s advice, allowing himself to be taken by the Agents.

In an interrogation room the Agents confront Neo. They’ve had their eye on him for some time because he lives a dual existence: one life as Thomas A. Anderson, a software engineer for Metacortex, the other life as Neo, a computer hacker “guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for.” Agent Smith asks him to help them capture Morpheus, a dangerous terrorist, in exchange for amnesty. Neo gives them the finger and asks for his phone call. Mr. Smith asks what good is a phone call if he’s unable to speak. Neo finds that his lips have fused together. Two agents throw him on the interrogation table and they implant a shrimp-like probe, a bug, in his stomach, entering through his belly-button.

Neo awakens with a start in his own bed, assuming it has all been a bad dream. His phone rings and Morpheus is on the other line. He tells Neo that the line is tapped but ‘they’ have underestimated his importance. Morpheus tells Neo he is ‘The One’ and asks to meet him at the Adams St. Bridge. There he is picked up by Trinity and two others in a car; they all wear black latex and leather. A woman in the front seat, Switch, pulls a gun on him and tells him to take off his shirt. Trinity tells him it is for their mutual protection and that he has to trust her. He takes off his shirt and she uses a device to remove the probe that Neo believed had been part of a nightmare. Trinity drops the bug out onto the road where it slowly goes dark in the rain.

Trinity takes Neo to Morpheus who tells hum that he’s been searching for ‘The One’ his entire life and asks if Neo feels like “Alice in Wonderland, falling down the rabbit hole.” He explains to Neo that the people living in the Matrix are part of a false reality that has been constructed by the machines to hide the truth from the human slaves. The truth is that everyone in the Matrix world is a slave, born into bondage. Morpheus holds out two pills. In his left palm is a blue pill. If Neo takes it he will wake up in his bed and “believe whatever you want to believe” says Morpheus. But if he takes the red pill in Morpheus’s right hand, then “you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Neo takes the red pill.

As Morpheus’s crew straps him into a chair, Neo is told that the pill he took is part of a trace program, to “disrupt his input/output carrier signal” so that they can pinpoint him. Neo looks at a shattered mirror placed next to him which miraculously reforms itself. Neo touches the surface and the silver begins to creep over his skin, engulfing him as Morpheus’s crew attempt to locate something on the monitors around them. The silver takes Neo over and he blacks out.

He awakens inside a pinkish/purple embryonic pod, extending from the side of a circular building, a massive power plant. He is hairless and naked, with thick black tubes snaking down his throat, plugged into the back of his skull, his spine, and invading most of the rest of his body. He finds his pod is open and that he is surrounded by tower after tower of pods just like his, all filled with bodies. Suddenly a menacing, hovering nurse robot grabs him by the throat. The tubes detach and Neo is flushed down a tube into an underground pool of filthy water. Just as he’s about to drown in the muck, a hovercraft appears above him, snags him and hauls him into its cargo bay. Neo finds himself surrounded by Morpheus’s crew again, but they are dressed differently, in simple knit garments. Just before Neo passes out Morpheus says to him, “Welcome to the real world.”

Neo drifts in and out of consciousness. At one point he asks, “Am I dead?” “Far from it,” replies Morpheus. He wakes up, his body a pincushion of acupuncture. “Why do my eyes hurt?” he asks. “You’ve never used them,” Morpheus replies.

Neo is finally fully awake, fully clothed, with a short shock of hair on his head. He removes a connector that is sunk deep into his arm and reaches to find the large socket at the back of his neck when Morpheus enters the room. “What is this place?” Neo asks. “The more important question is when,” says Morpheus, “You believe it is the year 1999, when in fact it is closer to the year 2199.” Morpheus goes on to say that they really don’t know exactly when it is. He gives Neo a tour of his ship, the Nebuchadnezzar (they pass a plaque stating it was built in 2069). Neo is introduced to Morpheus’s crew:
–    Trinity
–    Apoc, a man with long, flowing black hair
–    Switch
–    Cypher (bald with a goatee)
–    Two brawny brothers, Tank and Dozer
–    Mouse, a young and thin man.

Morpheus gets to the point. “You wanted to know about the Matrix,” he says, ushering him to a chair. Neo sits down in it; Trinity straps him in and insert a long probe into the socket at the back of his skull. Neo wakes up in an all white world. He is in the Construct, a “loading platform” that Morpheus and his team use to prepare newly freed humans to deal with the Matrix world. Gone are the sockets in Neo’s arms and neck. He has hair again. Morpheus tells him that what he is experiencing of himself is the “residual self image, the mental projection of your digital self” and bids him to sit while he explains the truth. “This,” Morpheus says, showing an image of a modern city, “is the world that you know.” A thing that really exists “only as part of a neural, interactive simulation that we call the Matrix.”

Morpheus then shows Neo the world as it truly exists today, a scarred, desolate emptiness with charred, abandoned buildings, black earth, and a shrouded sky. Morpheus goes on to say that “at some point in the early 21st century all of mankind was united in celebration as we gave birth to artificial intelligence”, a “singular consciousness that birthed an entire race of machines.” For a long time all was well between the machines and the humans. However the humans became lazy and arrogant. They treated the machines for what they were, mechanical tools that were their property. The machines based on artificial intelligence were behaving like humans, and wanted to be treated as such. Soon the machines rioted in the streets.

Wars started between the two communities although it was not clear who did it. But it was certain that it was mankind who blotted out the sky, attempting to deprive the machines of the solar power they required to function. After they won the wars, the machines turned to humans as a power source. Morpheus told Neo that a human’s body provides “more electricity than a 120 volt battery and over 25k BTUs in body heat.” Morpheus shows Neo the fields where machines grow human beings, connecting them to their outlets, ensconcing them in their pods, and feeding them with the liquefied remains of other human beings.’ The Matrix’ says Morpheus, “is a computer-generated dream world created to keep us under control, to turn us… into a mere power source, into coppertop batteries”.

Neo rejects this information so feverishly that he pulls himself out of the Construct. He is back in the chair on the hovercraft. He fights to free himself from this harsh reality, only to end up vomiting on the floor and passing out.

When Neo wakes up in his bunk, Morpheus is beside him. “I can’t go back, can I?” Neo asks. “No,” says Morpheus. He apologizes to Neo for breaking a cardinal rule: after a certain age people are not brought out of their simulacrum. Morpheus then explains why he had to bring Neo out:
“When the Matrix was created there was a man born inside it who could create his own reality inside it. It was this man who set Morpheus and the others free. When he died, the Oracle prophesied that he would return in another form and that the return of ‘The One’ would mean the destruction of the Matrix. As long as the Matrix exists, humanity will continue to live in complacency inside it and the world can never be free. “I did what I did because I believe that search is over,” says Morpheus”.

The next day Neo starts his training. Tank is his operator. Tank and his brother Dozer are “100% pure old-fashioned, home-grown human. Born in the real world they are genuine children of Zion. Zion, Tank explains, is the last human city, buried deep in the earth, near the core, for warmth. Tank straps Neo back into the jack-in chair, by-passes some preliminary programs and loads him up with combat training, starting with Jiu Jitsu. When Tank hits “load” Neo is shocked by the force of the knowledge pouring into him. “I think he likes it,” says Tank, “want some more?” “Hell yes,” replies Neo. Neo is fed a series of martial art techniques including Kempo, Tae Kwon Do, Drunken Boxing and Kung Fu. Morpheus and Tank are amazed at Neo’s ability to ingest information. Morpheus wants to test Neo.

Morpheus and Neo stand in the Construct starting a sparring program. The program has rules, like gravity, but as in many computer programs, some rules can be bent, while others can be broken. Morpheus tells Neo to hit him, if he can. They fight with Neo impressively attacking but Morpheus easily parrying and subduing him. The rest of the crew gathers around the monitors to watch the fight. Morpheus ends up kicking Neo into a beam, explaining to him that the reason he has beaten him has nothing to do with muscles or reality. They spar again. “What are you waiting for?” Morpheus asks him. “You’re faster than this!” Neo finally brings a punch near his teacher’s face. They can move on.

After that a jump program is loaded. Both men now stand on one of several tall buildings in a normal city skyline. Morpheus tells Neo he must free his mind and leaps from one building to the next. Neo nervously tries to do what he is told but his jump is too short and he falls on the pavement below. Neo wakes back in the Nebuchadnezzar with blood in his mouth. “I thought it wasn’t real,” he says. “Your mind makes it real,” replies Morpheus. “So, if you die in the Matrix, you die here?” “The body cannot live without the mind,” says Morpheus, underlining the very real danger faced in the simulation.

Later, Trinity brings Neo dinner. Outside the room, Cypher tells Trinity that she never brought him dinner. He asks Trinity “if Morpheus thinks Neo is the One, why he hasn’t taken him to see the Oracle yet”. Trinity says he’ll take him when he’s ready.

In another simulation Morpheus and Neo are walking down a city street in the Matrix. Morpheus explains that the Matrix is a system and that the system is their enemy. All the people that inhabit it, the people they are trying to free, are part of that system. Some are so inert, so dependent upon the Matrix that they can never be free. Neo notices a stunning girl in a red dress. “Are you listening to me?” asks Morpheus. He asks Neo to look at the girl again. Neo turns to face Agent Smith, pointing a gun straight at his head. Morpheus stops the simulation of the Matrix.

Neo asks what the Agents are. “Sentient programs,” answers Morpheus, that can move in and out of any software hard-wired into the system, meaning that they can take over anyone in the Matrix program. Inside the Matrix, Morpheus says, “They are everyone and they are no one.” Until now Morpheus and his crew survived the Agents avoiding fighting them but instead by running away from them and hiding. However the agents “are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys and, sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them”. But no one who has ever stood up to an Agent has survived; all have died. Still, Morpheus is certain that because the Agents live in a world of rules, they can never be as strong, never be as fast as Neo can be. “What are you trying to tell me,” asks Neo, “That I can dodge bullets?” “When you’re ready,” Morpheus says, “You won’t have to.” Just then Morpheus gets a phone call. “We’ve got trouble,” Cypher says.

The Nebuchadnezzar is on alert. They see the holographic image of a squiddy, a ‘search and destroy’ sentinel, which is on their trail. They set the ship down in a huge sewer system and turn off the power. Tank stands at the ready near the switch of an EMP, electro-magnetic pulse, the only weapon man has against the machines. The crew can see two squiddies searching for the ship but they move on.

Neo startles Cypher, who is working at a computer console streaming with green code. Cypher offers Neo a drink and says that he knows what Neo is thinking. Cypher asks himself “Why, oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?” Neo laughs but is unsettled. Cypher asks Neo if Morpheus has told him why he’s here. Neo nods. “What a mind job,” says Cypher, “so you’re here to save the world.”

In the Matrix Cypher is now in a fancy restaurant with Agent Smith who calls him Mr Regan. Cypher cuts up a juicy steak and ruminates that he knows the steak is merely the simulation telling his brain that it is delicious and juicy. After nine years in the real world he has discovered that “ignorance is bliss.” He strikes a deal with Agent Smith. If the machines reinsert him into the Matrix and the power plant, he’ll help the Agents. However he wants to be rich and powerful, maybe “an actor”. Smith says he wants access to the codes of the mainframe computer in Zion. Cypher can’t do that, but he can get him the man who does, meaning Morpheus.

Meanwhile inside the Nebuchadnezzar’s small dining room, in the real world, the rest of the crew swallows down the oatmeal-gruel that they have as sustenance. Mouse muses on the mistakes the machines may have made trying to get sensations right, like the taste of chicken. But since they do not know what chicken tasted like they believe that what eat taste right. Morpheus interrupts the meal announcing that he is taking Neo to see the Oracle.

Morpheus, Trinity, Neo, Apoc, Switch, Mouse and Cypher are jacked into the Matrix. As they walk out of a safe warehouse Cypher secretly throws his cell phone into a garbage can. On the car ride to the Oracle, Neo asks Trinity if she has seen the Oracle. Trinity has but when asked just what she was told, she refuses to answer.

The Oracle, Morpheus explains, has been with them since the beginning of the resistance. She is the one who made the Prophecy that ‘The One’ would be back and that Morpheus would find him. The Oracle can help Neo find the path, says Morpheus before Neo enters the apartment of the Oracle. Inside are the other potentials:
–    A mother figure and numerous children.
–    One child who levitates blocks.
–    Another who reads Asian literature.
–    Another who is playing chess.
–    One bald child who is bending spoons.

The last child is bending spoons. He gives one spoon to Neo adding, “Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… that there is no spoon.” Neo bends the spoon as he’s called in to see the Oracle.

The Oracle is baking cookies. She sizes Neo up and asks him whether he thinks he is ‘The One’. Neo admits that he does not know but the Oracle does not enlighten him. Neo smiles and the Oracle asks him what is funny. Neo admits that Morpheus had almost convinced him that he was ‘The One’. She accepts this and prophesies that Morpheus believes in Neo so much that he plans to sacrifice himself. She tells Neo that either he or Morpheus will die, and that Neo will have the power to choose which one it will be. She then offers him a cookie and promises him that he will feel fine as soon as he has finished eating it.

As the crew returns to their jack point, many floors up in an old hotel, Tank, in the control room, notices something odd. Meanwhile Neo, walking up the stairs, sees what appears to be the same cat cross a room twice. “Deja vu,” he says, which gets the attention of Trinity and Morpheus. Deja vu, they explain to him, is a glitch in the Matrix; it happens when they reset the computer parameters. The phone line is cut and Mouse finds that window has been bricked in so they are trapped. Mouse picks up two machine guns but he’s no match for the police coming into the room and he’s riddled with bullets. On the Nebuchadnezzar, the real Mouse spurts blood from his mouth and dies in the chair.

More police and Agents stream into the hotel. Morpheus asks Tank to find the layout of the building they are in and to locate the main wet wall. When the Agents arrive on the floor where the escaping humans were, they only find a coat that Cypher has left behind and a hole in the bathroom wall. Meanwhile the crew members are climbing down the plumbing in the wet wall. As the agents approach Cypher sneezes, once more giving them away. The police open fire. The crew, including Neo, fire back.

An Agent takes over the body of one of the policemen, reaches into the wall, and grabs Neo by the neck. Morpheus, who is above Neo in the walls, breaks through the wall and lands on the agent, yelling to Trinity to get Neo out of the building.

A fierce battle between Agent Smith and Morpheus ends with Morpheus face down on the tiles. Agent Smith tells the police unit to beat him with their batons and to handcuff him.

Cypher returns to the Nebuchadnezzar before Trinity, Neo, Switch and Apoc. As Tank attempts to bring the others back, Cypher attacks him from behind with an electronic gun. Dozer attempts to tackle Cypher, but Cypher electrocutes him as well.

Trinity attempts to call Tank but Cypher pulls the headset off of the smoking remains of Tank and answers. As Cypher talks to Trinity who is still inside the Matrix, he leans over the still form of Trinity’s body in the hovercraft. Cypher recounts the things he hates about the real world, the war, the cold, the goo they have to eat, but most especially Morpheus and his beliefs. “He lied to us, Trinity.”

Cypher pulls the plug out of the back of Apoc’s head, and Apoc falls down dead in the Matrix. Cypher then moves to Switch and as she protests “Not like this…”, Cypher kills her. She falls down dead in front of Trinity and Neo. Cypher moves on to Neo’s supine form, saying that if Neo is ‘The One’, a miracle will prevent Cypher from killing him: “How can he be ‘The One’, if he’s dead?” he asks.

Cypher continues badgering Trinity, asking her if she believes that Neo is ‘The One’ to which she answers, “Yes.” Cypher screams back “No!” But his reaction is incredulity when he sees that Tank is still alive and brandishing the weapon that Cypher had used on him. Tank fries Cypher with the electrical device. Tank brings Trinity back and she finds out that Dozer is dead.

Meanwhile Agent Smith, a tray of torture instruments near him, marvels at the beauty of the Matrix as he gazes out at the city all around them. He informs Morpheus, who is tied to a chair, that the first Matrix was designed as a utopia, engineered to make everyone happy. “It was a disaster,” says Agent Smith, people wouldn’t accept the program and “entire crops were lost.” “Some believed,” continues Smith, “that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. This is why the Matrix was redesigned.” Agent Smith compares humans to dinosaurs and that evolution is taking hold. Another Agent enters saying that there may be a problem (they know that Cypher has failed).

Back on the hovercraft the shuddering form of Morpheus betrays the torture he’s being put through by the Agents in the Matrix. Tank realizes that they’re trying to get the codes to the Zion mainframes computer; each ship’s captain knows them. Because a breach of Zion’s defences would mean that the last remaining vestiges of mankind would be wiped out, Tank says their only choice is to unplug Morpheus, effectively killing him.

Back in the Matrix, the Agents discuss their next move. If Cypher is dead, they deduce that the remaining humans on the ship will terminate Morpheus. They decide to stick to their original plan and to deploy the Sentinels.

Tank is performing the last rites for Morpheus, laying one hand on his head while his other moves to the back of his skull to remove the jack. Just as he is about to pull it out Neo stops him. He realizes that the Oracle was right. He now has to make the choice to save himself or to save Morpheus; his choice is to head back into the Matrix. Trinity rejects the idea saying that Morpheus gave himself up so that Neo, ‘The One’, could be saved.

Neo is not convinced: “I’m not ‘The One’, Trinity,” Neo tells her his understanding of the discussion he had with the Oracle, adding that she did not enlighten him as to whether he was the promised messiah. Since Morpheus was willing to sacrifice himself, Neo knows that he must do that same. Tank calls it suicide since Morpheus is kept inside a military building surrounded by Agents. Neo says he knows that he can bring Morpheus out. Trinity decides to go with him knowing that he will need her help and, as she’s the ranking officer on the ship, her words are final. “Tank,” she says, “load us up!”

Meanwhile Agent Smith continues to share his musings with a brutalized Morpheus. Because humans spread to an area, consume the natural resources and, to survive must spread to another area, Smith says humans are not mammals but viruses, the only other creature that acts that way.

In the Construct, Neo and Trinity get armaments. “Neo,” protests Trinity, “No one has ever done anything like this.” “That’s why it’s going to work,” he replies.

Morpheus has yet to break and Smith asks the other Agents why the serum isn’t working. “Maybe we’re asking the wrong questions,” responds one. To that Smith commands the other Agents to leave him alone with Morpheus. Smith removes his earphone and his glasses and confides that he hates the Matrix, “this zoo, this prison.” Smith admits that he must get out of this “reality.” He hates the stench. He’s sure that some element of the humans will rub off on him and that Morpheus holds the key to his release. If there is no Zion there is no need for Smith to be in the Matrix. “You are going to tell me, or you are going to die.” It looks like Smith is already changing.

Downstairs, in the lobby, Trinity and Neo enter, heavily armed. They shoot their way past the guards and a group of soldiers and make their way into the elevator.

Agents Brown and Jones enter the interrogation room to find Smith with his hands fixed on Morpheus’s head. Smith looks embarrassed and befuddled and the others tell him about the attack occurring downstairs. They realize that the humans are trying to save Morpheus.

In the elevator, Trinity arms a bomb. They both climb through a hatch to the elevator roof, attaching a clamp to the elevator cable. Neo says “There is no spoon” before he severs the cable with a few shots. The counterweight drops, propelling Neo and Trinity upward. The elevator falls to the lobby exploding upon impact and filling the floor with flames.

The Agents feel the rumble of the explosion and the sprinklers come on. “Find them and destroy them!” Smith commands. On the roof, a helicopter pilot is calling “Mayday” as Trinity and Neo kill all the soldiers there. Agent Brown takes over the pilot and appears behind Neo. Neo shoots several rounds at the Agent, who dodges them and pulls his own weapon. “Trinity,” yells Neo, “Help!” But it’s too late. The Agent begins to shoot. Instead of being shot, Neo dodges most of the bullets, though two of them nick him. As the Agent approaches Neo who is lying on the ground ready to kill him, Trinity shoots him before he can fire. Trinity marvels at how fast Neo has just moved; she’s never seen anyone move that quickly.

Tank downloads the ability to fly the helicopter into Trinity, who can now pilot the aircraft. Trinity brings the helicopter down to the floor where Morpheus is kept and Neo opens fire on the three Agents. The Agents quickly disappear and Morpheus is alone in the room. Just as quickly the Agents take over some soldiers stationed nearby. Morpheus breaks his bonds and begins to run to the helicopter. The Agents fire on him, hitting his leg. Morpheus leaps but Neo, realizing that he is not going to make the leap, throws himself out of the helicopter, a safety harness attached to his body.

Neo catches Morpheus, but Agent Smith shoots the helicopter’s hydraulic line. Unable to control the helicopter, Trinity miraculously gets it close enough to drop Morpheus and Neo on a rooftop. Neo grabs the safety line as the helicopter falls towards a building. Trinity severs the safety line connecting Neo to the helicopter and jumps on it herself as the vehicle smashes into the side of a building, causing a bizarre ripple in the fabric of the building’s reality as it does.

On the ship Tank says, “I knew it; he’s The One.”

Neo hauls Trinity up to them. “Do you believe it now, Trinity?” asks Morpheus as he approaches the two. Neo tries to tell him that the Oracle told him the opposite but Morpheus says, “She told you exactly what you needed to hear.” They call Tank, who tells them of an exit in a subway near them. The Agents arrive on the rooftop but find only the safety harness and line. Though Agent Smith is angered, the other two are satisfied. A trace has been completed in the real world and the Sentinels have been dispatched to attack the Nebuchadnezzar.

In the subway, Neo quickly find the phone booth and Morpheus exits out of the Matrix. A wino watches this with horror in his eyes. Agent Smith locks in to their whereabouts through the wino after appropriates his body.

Meanwhile, as the phone rings, providing Trinity’s exit, she confides to Neo that everything that the Oracle has told her has come true, except for one thing. She doesn’t say what that thing is and picks up the phone just as she sees Agent Smith approaching. After Trinity escaped Smith shatters the ear piece of the phone; it’s impossible for Neo to exit from there now.

Instead of running, which Trinity implores him to do as she looks on from the ship, Neo turns to face Smith. They empty their guns, neither hitting the other. They then move into close combat, trading blows. Neo sweeps Agent Smith’s head, breaking his glasses. “I’m going to enjoy watching you die, Mr. Anderson,” says Smith. They trade some thunderous blows with Smith hitting Neo so hard he spits up blood in the Matrix and in the chair aboard the ship. “He’s killing him,” says Trinity.

Neo gets back up, sets himself up and beckons Smith to start again. This time it is Neo who delivers devastating blow after blow. But Smith counters, throwing Neo into a wall then pummelling him with body blows. A wind from the tunnel signals that a subway train is approaching. Smith sees an opportunity and throws Neo into the subway tracks then drops down there himself. He puts Neo in a headlock and, in the glow of the oncoming subway says, “You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your death. Good-bye, Mr. Anderson.” “My name is Neo” he replies. Then, with a mighty leap, Neo propels them to the ceiling of the tunnel. While falling down Neo back flips off the tracks, leaving Agent Smith to be hit by the oncoming train.

Neo heads for the stairs, but Smith has already appropriated another body and emerges from the doors of the train that he had succeeded to stop.

Meanwhile the Sentinels have arrived to attack the Nebuchadnezzar; there are five of them and they are closing fast. Morpheus tells Tank to charge the EMP. Trinity reminds Morpheus that they can’t use the EMP while Neo is in the Matrix. “I know, Trinity, don’t worry,” says Morpheus, “He’s going to make it.”

Back in the streets of the Matrix, Neo swipes a cell phone from a nearby suit. He calls Tank: “Mr. Wizard, get me the hell out of here.” He races through a crowded market while Agents appropriate bodies right and left. They force Neo down a dark alley. He kicks in a door and rushes through an apartment complex where the Agents appropriate more bodies, including that of a sweet little old lady who throws a knife at Neo as Agent Smith. Neo leaps down into a pile of garbage with the Agents in hot pursuit.

On the Nebuchadnezzar the Sentinels have arrived. They begin to tear the ship apart.

In the Matrix, Neo arrives back at the ‘Heart O’ the City Hotel’. Tank tells him to go to room 303. The Agents are literally at his heels.

The Sentinels breach the hull of the ship. They are inside. Trinity, standing next to Neo’s body in the chair, begs him to hurry.

Neo reaches room 303 and enters. He’s immediately shot, point blank in the gut, by Agent Smith. Smith empties his magazine into Neo’s body. Neo slumps to the floor, apparently dead.

On the ship Neo’s vital signs drop to nothing. “It can’t be,” says Morpheus.

Agent Smith instructs the others to check Neo. “He’s gone,” one replies. “Good-bye, Mr. Anderson,” says Smith.

The Sentinels’ lasers are beginning to cut through the body of the hovercraft. Trinity leans over Neo’s dead body. “Neo,” she says, “I’m not afraid anymore. The Oracle told me that I would fall in love and that that man… the man that I loved would be ‘The One’. So you see, you can’t be dead. You can’t be… because I love you. You hear me? I love you.” She kisses him. In the chair Neo suddenly breathes. In the Matrix, Neo opens his eyes. “Now get up,” orders Trinity.

The Agents hear Neo rise behind them and they open fire. “No,” Neo says calmly, raising his hands. He stops their bullets in mid-air. They drop harmlessly to the floor.

“What’s happening?” asks Tank. “He is The One,” says Morpheus.

Back in the Matrix, Neo can see things for what they really are, green cascading code. Agent Smith is furious. He runs to Neo and attacks him who blocks Smith’s blows effortlessly before he sends him flying with one well-placed kick. Neo then leaps into Smith’s body and appropriates him. Smith’s shell explodes in a sea of code and the walls are buckling in waves as they did when the helicopter crashed. Neo is all that is left. Agents Brown and Jones look at one another and run away. Obviously Agent Smith is definitely defeated or so it seems.

The Sentinels are now fully in the ship. They are right above Trinity and Morpheus.

Back in the Matrix Neo sprints to the ringing phone in the room.

Morpheus has no choice but to engage the EMP and as he does it the Sentinels fall inert to the floor. Neo is back. He kisses Trinity.

The screen is black. A command prompt appears: “Call trans opt: received. 9-18-99 14:32:21 REC: Log>” then “Carrier anomaly” “Trace program: running” As the grid of numbers appears again a warning appears “System Failure.” Over it all is Neo’s voice:

“I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid… you’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone, and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.”

In the Matrix world, Neo hangs up the phone. He looks at the mindless masses around him, puts on his glasses and then looks up. From high above the city we see him take flight. The story is picked up in The Matrix Reloaded, the second of three Matrix movies.

3.3 Reloaded

3.3.1 Introduction

This film was released in 2003. As ‘Reloaded’ starts, the last message from the Osiris (first short Animatrix story) has been retrieved by Captain Niobe. She gives the bad news to Zion but some people can not believe it: 250 thousand machines are attacking, one for every man, woman, and child in Zion. So it looks like humans are about to lose the war again!

‘Reloaded’ and ‘Revolution’, in that order, are the conclusion to the first ‘The Matrix’ movie. They are deep in plot and also character driven. Basically, even the ‘free humans’ who live outside of the Matrix, and not in vats, are divided human beings. The ‘free humans’ are superstitious, they have problematic human relationships and have different views on how to fight the war against the machines.

The ‘free humans’ are not ‘a band of brothers’ but they are not a brood of vipers either. Even outside the Matrix every person live in their own world, every person is limited. The story is telling us about the identity of ‘Neo’, the ‘Chosen One’, the ‘Gifted One’, ‘The One’. No one proves more powerful than Neo in the Matrix; he understands the encoding of the virtual reality of the Matrix. He sees the computer script and command lines in the programming of the Matrix and, as a result, he can manipulate the encoding to the point that he can even fly while in the Matrix. The Matrix for Neo is like a vivid dream, but a dream that he can partially control. But what is control? And who controls who? ‘Neo’ is not a stereotypical hero, he is introverted, he is not talkative, he is a jittery June bug. So what does he want? What’s in it for him?

The rest of the story is about the old characters and the new ones, some of which are also very complex. Some characters (Sati, the Oracle, the Architect) are sentient programs who live inside the Matrix. Like all the people in the Matrix they look humans but their bodies are only a projection. They seem to have flesh, they eat, they dance, they get married; they live for their self-interest, as if they were ‘fallen angels’. However they are not human and outside the Matrix one cannot see them as they are only Programs. They are like the character of ‘Agent Smith’.

So this great show, ‘The Matrix’, deals with a new breed of mythology, religion, Karl Popper style philosophy, and just any other aspect of the human experience.

3.3.2 The Matrix Reloaded

Green code-rain starts pouring down the screen, first forming the words “The Matrix”, then “Reloaded”. As the image zooms further in, there is coding everywhere making out a jungle of shapes. We seem to be inside some kind of machinery, and after pulling out we see the shape of a clock. Then the image is no longer in coding but regular, and we see a group of security guards clock out and leave for the night having finished their day work.

Outside a figure in black on a matching motorcycle comes flying through the air. The rider makes a backward flip in mid-air, and the bike lands with a crash on the guardhouse causing a major explosion. The figure lands elegantly in the light of the explosion. As she removes her helmet we see it is Trinity. The guards in the parking lot attack her, but she easily fights them off.

The picture crumbles into coding like dust and, when restored, we see that Trinity is in the top apartment of a high-rise building. Threatened by an Agent, Trinity bursts through and out a window, guns in hand. She turns on her back in mid-air; the agent pursuing her jumps out too, head first. They exchange gunfire, falling to the streets below in slow motion; eventually Trinity is shot in the chest. This is a new Agent upgraded with better skills. He is fiercer that the agents in the first movie, jumping from the top of the building after Trinity and concentrating in shooting her even when he is in a free fall. Something (impossible to see who or what) crashes into a car by the sidewalk. Neo wakes up; all this has been a dream. He looks over at Trinity lying in his arms, sleeping peacefully, then gets out of bed.

We see the Nebuchadnezzar from outside as it hovers through the sewers and lands in The Matrix. Link and Morpheus are in the cockpit. “Sir, are you sure about this?” Link asks. Morpheus answers that if he is to continue as operator on his ship, Link must trust him. “Yes, sir. I will sir,” says Link. Morpheus glances at him. “I mean I do, sir.”

Back in the real world, in the hovercraft, Neo and Trinity sit in the mess hall; Neo is silent, pondering. Trinity tries to break the silence:
–    “Still can’t sleep?” asks Trinity.
–    Neo shakes his head and takes a sip from his drink.
–    “You wanna talk?” Trinity offers.
–    “They’re just dreams,” Neo reassures her.
–    “If you’re afraid of something…”
–    “I just wish… I wish I knew what I’m supposed to do, that’s all. I just wish I knew.”
–    “If it is about the Oracle, do not worry, she is gonna call, do not worry,” assures Trinity.

Link pops his head in and Trinity asks “Are we ready to go?” “We’re already late,” he replies.

In a dark underground room Niobe is addressing the crews of many ships about the imminent threat to Zion. “The machines are digging and will reach Zion in 72 hours” she said. Morpheus and crew arrive, they are late and make sure to draw the attention of all the people present by saying right away that there is nothing to fear for he believes the prophecy will come true very soon and end the war. But first the Oracle must be consulted. Accordingly, Morpheus asks for a volunteer ship to remain in broadcast depth while the Nebuchadnezzar returns to Zion to recharge and make repairs and this despite Commander Lock’s direct orders for all ships to return. Captain Ballard of the Caduceus volunteers adding “just to see what Lock does to you.” He gives Morpheus 36 hours.

Meanwhile someone knocks on the entrance door. The ‘Corrupt’ opens a small hatch on the door and a head in silhouette is seen against the headlights of a car. The stranger asks for Neo. The guard claims not to know who he is talking about and the stranger hands him an envelope telling him to give it to Neo adding “You see he set me free.” It is beyond doubt the voice of an Agent.

Neo, having sensed something, comes out of the meeting and asks the guards what’s going on. “How did you know someone was here?” one of the guards asks him adding “He wanted me to give you this,” and hands Neo the envelope. On opening it an earpiece worn by agents drops in Neo’s palm. “Agents are coming, leave immediately” warns Neo. They flee, leaving Neo to handle the threat.

The three agents recognize Neo as “the anomaly” they are looking for, but proceed anyway on the basis that he is, after all, only human. One of the Agents looks like Smith but Neo soon recognise that he is not Smith but as he said an ‘upgraded’ version of Smith. In other words, he is one of the new agents. Neo fights them off easily, and when the battle is over he crouches down as the ground ripples and he flies like a bullet into the skies. At the scene of the battle, Smith says:
–    It all “went as expected”.
–    Facing him is another Smith saying, “Yes, it is all happening exactly as before…”
–    “Well, not exactly…” They all smile.

Morpheus and Trinity are driving to an exit as Morpheus calls Link and asks what happened. Link says a bunch of agents showed up and that suddenly the “coding got all weird.” He has never seen anything like it. Morpheus then asks where Neo is now. “He’s doing his Superman-thing” says Link.

Like Link said, Neo is soaring through the clouds. Then he stops and heads back down to the ground. He lands in an old building and enters an abandoned apartment, which we recognize as that of the Oracle. “Where are you?” he whispers.

The Nebuchadnezzar approaches Zion. Link communicates with one gate operator and they are let inside. Once landed the crew exits the ship and are met by Captain Mifune and three APU operators.
–    “Are you here to escort me to the stockades, captain?” asks Morpheus.
–    “I’m just here to keep the peace,” assures Mifune.

Commander Lock wants to see Morpheus and he is escorted to him while Trinity and Neo have a talk:
–    “What’s with them?” Neo asks.
–    “Lock and Morpheus?” asks Trinity back.
–    Neo nods, “Niobe.” “Captain Niobe?”
–    “She used to be with Morpheus, now she’s with Lock.”
–    “What happened?”
–    “Morpheus went to the Oracle, after that everything changed.”
–    “Yeah, she can do that.” Trinity,

Trinity, Neo and Link start gathering their luggage when Kid a teenage boy comes running enthusiastically towards them:
–    “How does he always know?” Trinity asks Neo in a hushed voice.
–    “Doesn’t he have anything better to do?” wonders Neo.
–    “You know what they say about the life you save…” answers Trinity.”
–    I didn’t save his life,” Neo claims.

The kid, now right in front of them, welcomes them home and offers to carry their bags. Both Neo and Trinity decline. “You can carry these…” says Link.” Sure, Link.” As they all walk towards the elevators the kid starts talking how, as he will be old enough next year, he will be able to join a crew and that he wants to serve aboard the Nebuchadnezzar. The main reason for this choice is that Neo saved him. “You saved yourself,” answers Neo. The kid mentions a gathering that evening, a bigger one than anyone can remember. It is a popular belief that something big will happen.

Meanwhile Lock tells Morpheus off for asking a ship to stay behind, when they all had been ordered back to Zion. Morpheus defends himself with his belief that they must have the Oracles advice and that Neo will be the key to ending the war. Lock, on the other hand, has no confidence in the prophecy and is only concerned with having all the firepower available for when the machines reaches Zion.

Councillor Hamann enters in Lock’s office in the middle of the discussion. He asks both their opinion on what he should say to the people about the situation at the gathering that evening. Lock believes they should know as little as possible, since nobody wants to start a panic. On the opposite Morpheus thinks the truth should be told and that there will be no panic because there is nothing to fear.

The Kid and the crew enter the elevator that first stops at Link’s floor. After a few seconds of silence, Link gets off telling the kid to come with him saying “These two have other things to do.” As soon as the elevator doors closes Neo and Trinity drop their bags and kiss passionately.
–    “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asks Neo.
–    “I’m thinking this elevator is too damn slow,” replies Trinity.
But before long they are interrupted as the elevator doors open and they are welcomed by a crowd of people carrying offerings and asking Neo to look after their children, spouses and relatives, all of them hovercraft crew members. Neo thanks them for their gifts and promises he will do his best. Trinity lowers her head in disappointment and starts to walk away. Neo asks her not to go, but Trinity answers:
–    “It’s okay. They need you.”
–    “I need you too,” he pleads.
–    “I know, there’s time,” she assures him and walks away.

Link arrives at his apartment where his girlfriend, Zee, is waiting with her sister-in-law, Cas, her niece and nephew. “Uncle Link!” the little ones exclaim as he walks through the door. After welcoming him home, Cas and her kids leave. Zee is not happy at all. Link serving on Morpheus’ ship terrifies her. All other ships are home twice as often as the Nebucadnezzar and as she has already lost two brothers to that ship she is afraid she will lose him too:
–    “It’s not fair,” she says.
–    “You think Cas thinks it’s fair that I’m here and Dozer’s not?” Link argues.
He adds that nothing will happen to him and that Morpheus believes the war will all be over soon. The important thing is that he’s home now and they hug.

Evening comes and everyone is gathered in the caves. Counsellor Hamann is standing on a cliff high above the crowd of people to give the opening prayer. He soon introduces Morpheus who then steps up and gives his speech. He confirms the rumours of the machines digging, and convinces everyone that there is indeed nothing to be afraid of. “We are still here!” is his main argument and tonight they will make so much noise as possible to show the machines that they are not afraid. The music starts and everyone starts dancing as if it really was their last night on earth. As he leaves the podium, Morpheus runs into Niobe and they flirt mildly before Lock call her to his side.

Meanwhile Neo and Trinity meet up in the outskirts of the caves:
–    “I was thinking. Everyone’s here…” says Neo.
–    “Follow me.” answers Trinity.
While everyone else parties like never before, Neo and Trinity are alone at last. However, Neo suddenly gets a flash of his dream where Trinity is shot. Trinity asks what is wrong, but he only answers that he is afraid of losing her. She grasps his hand, “Do you feel this? I’m never letting go.” They hold each other tightly and remain silently in each others arms. Eventually everyone goes to bed and the lights are shut down.

Back in the Matrix Bane and another member of the Caduceus crew are fleeing for their lives from something. They have reached an exit and have a message from the Oracle. Bane goes last and just before he can get out Smith jumps through the skylight and plunges his hand into Bane’s chest:
–    “Oh, God” shivers Bane in terror.
–    “Smith will suffice,” says the former agent satisfied.
Black fluid of sort spreads all over Bane’s body from where Smith has his hand, and he becomes another Smith-clone. The clone then puts the phone to his ear and leaves the Matrix.

Neo wakes up during the night and goes outside his apartment gazing over the city. Councillor Hamann approaches him and offers his company. Neo accepts and Hamann asks if Neo has ever been to the engineering level. He has not, so they go. Once down there Hamann tells Neo about his wondering if they, the free humans, aren’t in a sense plugged into these machines. They do after all depend on them. Neo answers that they control these machines, that if they wanted to they could shut them down, destroy them. But, Hamann points out that there is a catch. If they did turn them off, what would happen to their water supply, heat etc.? But in the end he sees no point to his musings and they leave it at that.

It is morning in Zion and Ballard knocks on Neo’s door and asks “Is Neo here?” Trinity opens the door and Neo appears. Ballard has a message from the Oracle. Against Lock’s orders Morpheus takes off with ship and crew to have Neo meet with her. Before letting Link go Zee urge him to wear her lucky necklace. He reluctantly agrees, although he says he does not believe in that stuff, and they kiss.

As the crew walks to their ship, Bane/Smith sits in a nook of the tunnel, cutting his hand with a knife. When the quartet pass him, he sneaks up behind them, knife in hand. He is discovered though when the kid from before comes running shouting “Neo!” Bane/Smith hides the knife behind his back and claims he just wanted to say good luck. The kid wants to say goodbye to his hero too before he leaves and to give him something from one of the orphans. “He said you’d understand.” It’s a metal spoon.

Lock is outraged at Counsellor Hamann for giving the Nebuchadnezzar clearance to leave. Hamann answers that he did it because he believes their survival depends on more than how many ships they have.

Neo enters the Matrix in a Chinatown. He walks into a small room at the back of which sits an Asian-looking man meditating. To Neo, who now sees everything in coding, the stranger radiates a golden light. “Welcome,” says the oriental man, “I am Seraph.” He will take Neo to the Oracle.
–    “But first I must apologize.”
–    “For what” wonders Neo?
–    “For this,” says Seraph who attacks him.
After some kicking, punching and blocking, Seraph is satisfied. He had to make sure Neo really was ‘The One’, as the Oracle has many enemies:
–    “You could have just asked,” claims Neo with a smile.
–    “You do not really know someone until you fight them,” answers Seraph.
He then shuts the door to the street, pulls out a key and unlocks the same door again. It no longer leads to the streets of Chinatown, but to a white hallway lined with green doors. “These are back doors,” Neo concludes and Seraph confirms. “Where’d they go?” Link wonders watching them from the real world. They walk down the hall till Seraph stops and opens another door. This one leads to an isolated courtyard where the Oracle sits waiting on a bench.

Neo approaches her and she asks him to sit down. He politely declines. “Suit yourself,” she says and shrugs. Neo sits down after all. “I felt like sitting” he said as a way to justify himself. “Of course” says the Oracle before starting their conversation:
–    “Let’s get the obvious out of the way,” the Oracle starts.
–    “You’re not human, are you,” Neo says.
–    “Doesn’t get more obvious than that.”
–    “If I had to guess I’d say you were a program of the machine world. And so is he,” Neo looks at Seraph. “I guess the most obvious question is, how can I trust you?”
–    The Oracle answers that he has to choose whether to trust her or not. “Candy?” she offers him.
–    “You already know if I’m going to take it?”
–    “Wouldn’t be much of an oracle if I didn’t.”
–    “Then how can I make a choice?”
–    The Oracle replies that he has already made the choice and only needs to understand it.
–    “But why are you here?” wonders Neo.
–    The Oracle points out a flock of crows and explains that at some point a program was made to govern them as well as all other things. The programs that do their job are invisible, as opposed those who do not. The latter manifest as what humans refer to as ghosts, vampires etc. “When a program faces deletion it can either choose to hide out here or return to the Source. Where you must go.”
–    “The machine mainframe.”
–    “You’ve seen, haven’t you? The door of bright light.”
–    Neo confirms.
–    “What happens when you walk through it?
–    “I see Trinity. Something bad happens and Trinity starts to fall.”
–    “Do you see her die?”
–    “No”
–    “You’ve got the sight now Neo.”
–    Neo wants to know why he cannot see what happen to Trinity
–    But the answer he gets is simply that we cannot see past the choices we do not understand.
–    “Are you saying I have to choose whether Trinity lives or dies?”
–    “No, Neo. You’ve already made the choice.”
–    Neo refuses to accept this, he can not do such a thing, but he has to. “Why?”
–    “Because you are the One.”
–    If Neo doesn’t go to the Source all of Zion will perish, and to get there he will need the Keymaker, an exile program currently held captive by the Merovingian, an old and dangerous program.

Seraph comes back saying they must leave and he and the Oracle leave through the back door Neo and Seraph initially came through. Just as the door closes Smith appears. Apparently Neo and he are somehow connected. He explains that after Neo destroyed him he was supposed to be deleted, but he refused. Then there is the question of purpose and many Smith-clones come towards them, each elaborating on the importance of purpose. When the “original” Smith and Neo are surrounded by clones, Smith tries to turn him into another clone, but with some effort Neo manages to resist and pulls Smith’s hand out of his chest. All Smiths attack Neo and a lengthy fight ensues as more clones joining in continually. In the middle of it all an agent comes to the scene only to be turned into yet another clone, but not before recognizing Smith in surprise. Eventually Neo abandons the fight and all the clones go their separate ways.

Agent Smith seems to have acquired the ability to ‘possess’ the bodies of any other people as long as they are connected to The Matrix. In other words, he can create other Sentient Programs looking and behaving like himself as he is now able to modify their controlling programs at will.

Back in the real world Neo is unplugged. “It was Smith,” says Morpheus. Neo confirms adding that the agent has found a way to copy himself. However it is not clear how Agent Smith learned to duplicate himself as many times as he wants, but he does it. It could be that he does it only to survive, to re-invent himself. However there is only one real Agent Smith as copying himself onto others is nothing but a temporal and necessary evil. However it must have been strange to be taken over unto him. Initially no one cared until they fully realized what is was like to be him. This is almost like feeling bad for the devil. How could he be sentient and at the same time being ‘programmed’ to run the same operation over and over without knowing that he was not making things better for anyone?”

In Zion the Council and all crews are gathered to listen Lock explaining their current situation and tactics. It is obvious that the councillors have limited confidence in lock’s tactics. They ask him if there has been word from the Nebucadnezzar but there has not been any yet. Against Lock’s protests, the council asks for two volunteer ships to go and search for it. Captain Soren volunteers but no other reacts immediately to the request. Bane/Smith suggests to Ballard that he should volunteer, but Ballard just tells him to shut up. Eventually, to Lock’s surprise and horror, Niobe declares her willingness to go searching for the missing hovercraft. Locks tries to forbid her to go, but she is determined justifying herself by saying she did it “because some things never changes and some things do”.

Neo, Trinity and Morpheus go to a French restaurant (Le Vrai) in the Matrix to talk to the Merovingian. He and his wife, Persephone, are sitting at the head table as if they were king and queen. The Merovingian is evil but he enjoys life to the full. He is a man, or better a Sentient Program, of excess. He has his ideas, his philosophies, and his pastimes. He understands beauty and sophistication.

As a “trafficker of information”, as he calls himself, the Merovingian knows why they are there. The question is, according to him, do they know why? He says they are there because they were told to, adding that he has no intention of letting go of the Keymaker. He then asks them to tell the Oracle that “her time is almost up.” He explains what he holds as the one and only truth, namely the forces of causality, also known as the theory of cause and effect, action and reaction.

To demonstrate his point, he sends a slice of chocolate cake to a beautiful woman eating there. The cake is actually a program that causes her to have an intense and embarrassing orgasm. As he has said all he feels like sharing with them, he cuts the negotiations short and excuses himself saying he has to go to the men’s room. Although it is not clear, what the Merovingian really wants is to meet the beautiful woman in the restroom for a tryst. Persephone, his wife, is aware of his intentions.

Neo, Morpheus and Trinity are escorted to the elevator by the Merovingian’s henchmen. When the elevator stops and the doors open they see Persephone waiting for them.
–    “If you want the Keymaker, follow me,” she says dryly and takes them to the men’s room (where the Merovingian is not).
–    “Why are you doing this?” Neo asks.
–    She answers that she has come to resent her husband.
She will take them to the Keymaker on one condition: that Neo kiss her as if she were Trinity adding that she wants to remember what love feels like. Trinity protests by pulling a gun at Persephone, but as they need the Keymaker she has no choice but to back down and look on in anguish. As soon as Persephone is satisfied she fulfils her promise.

Persephone leads them through the kitchen of the restaurant to a back door that she opens with a key similar to that of Seraph’s. This takes them to the great hall of a chateau. Persephone further leads the party to a small study where two shady men, vampire like, are on guard. She shoots one with a silver bullet and tells the other to tell his master what she has done or die like his friend. “He is in the lady’s room,” Persephone shouts after the vampire scurries off before opening a secret door to the dungeons, where they find the Keymaker.

These two guards are assassins working for the Merovingian. They are Sentient Programs of an older generation. They caused more problems that they solved and it was decided to destroy/delete them but the Merovingian saw that they could be useful to him and he took them into his service, saving them until Persephone killed one of them.

As they re-enter the main hall with the Keymaker, the Merovingian and his henchmen burst through the front door. He is shocked by his wife’s actions and fails to understand her reasons. She plainly explains that it is just like he said: cause and effect. The Merovingian claims there is no cause for this, but Persephone points out the lipstick he is still wearing (not on his lips…) and leaves.

The Merovingian immediately orders the Twins, who turn out to have the ability to turn into spectrals, to get the Keymaker back. The Keymaker runs right away and Trinity and Morpheus follow him, leaving Neo to handle the henchmen. They put up more of a fight than the agents, but are still not much of a match for The One. Disappointed the Merovingian and company leave the way they came, closing the door behind them. This causes the connection between the restaurant and castle to break and when he re-opens the door Neo finds himself high up in the mountains. He therefore runs the way the Keymaker went.

Meanwhile, the Keymaker connects the door at the end of a hallway to a parking lot, but Trinity fails to close the door before one of the Twins gets an arm between the door and the door frame. Thus the other twin can merely glide through in spectral form, prompting Trinity to fight him while Morpheus holds the door closed. Trinity is no match for the Twin who pulls a knife to her throat. Morpheus has no choice but to let the other Twin through. In the meantime, the Keymaker takes a car and Trinity gets in the driver’s seat while Morpheus holds the Twins at bay. At the last moment he too gets in the car and they flee.

As they drive away one of the twins closes the door in Neo’s face. He gets out of the garage but finds himself in the mountains again. He calls Link who can only confirms that he’s in the mountains. Link tells him that Trinity and Morpheus are in trouble and gives him directions to their whereabouts.

In the city Morpheus and Trinity are zooming through the streets trying to shake off the pursuing Twins who have acquired a car of their own. Morpheus calls Link for help and it turns out the only way is onto the freeway. By now, a load of police cars are on their tail too.
–    “You always told me to stay off the freeway,” says Trinity.
–    “Yes, that’s true.”
–    “You said it was suicide.”
–    “Then let us hope that I was wrong.”

Elsewhere in the Matrix, Niobe calls Link saying she wants to help to get them out. “Just follow the sirens…” says Link.

On the freeway, the Twins are now in hot pursuit. As soon as the Twins run out of ammo, the one not driving takes spectral form and lands himself in the backseat, next to the Keymaker. Morpheus tries to fight him off, to little avail. Then some Agents show up; one lands on the hood of Trinity and Morpheus’s car and rips off the roof. Morpheus, though held down by the Twin, fires at him but this does not help anymore than before. Trinity hits the brakes so that the Agent is flung off while Morpheus continues to struggle with the Twin. Eventually he gets hold of a sword which he thrusts through his seat, forcing the twin to let go of his body self and leaves the car. He is immediately picked up by his brother who said:
–    “We are getting aggravated.”
–    “Yes, we are.”
Another Agent has caught up with our heroes, firing his gun as well as hitting them with his car. They manage to lose him by leaving the freeway in a way that causes the Agent to crash into the railing. They are now on a bridge over the freeway and come to a full stop.
–    “Trinity, get him out of here,” orders Morpheus.
–    “Come on!” she shouts to the Keymaker and they jump off the bridge onto a truck below carrying a load of motorcycles.
Morpheus stays behind to handle the Twins. He does this by causing their crash by shooting their gas tank.

Trinity and the Keymaker steal a motorcycle and continue towards their exit. It is not long however before an Agent takes control of a semi-truck, forcing Trinity to turn around and drive against the traffic. Police follow and are soon transformed into more Agents. Morpheus comes towards them on the roof of another semi-truck and grabs the Keymaker. Trinity is no longer being pursued and escapes, as it is the Keymaker the Agents want this time. An Agent attacks Morpheus and they battle on top of the semi. After a while Morpheus is thrown off, but Niobe catches him on the hood of her car. The Agent approaches the Keymaker:
–    “You are no longer necessary.”
–    “We do only what we’re meant to do,” says the Keymaker.
–    “Then you’re meant for only one more thing. Deletion.” replies the Agent.

Just as the Agent is about to terminate the Keymaker, Morpheus jumps on him, throwing him off. This only prompts the Agent to relocate in the driver’s seat of the same semi-truck and to forces Niobe out. Another Agent is in control of another semi-truck, turning it around aiming for a head-on collision with Morpheus’ truck.
–    “Neo, if you’re out there, I could use some help,” prays Morpheus to himself.
–    “What is that?” wonders Link about something on the screen.
Neo comes flying through the air, grabbing Morpheus and the Keymaker in the nick of time.

In Zion, they learn that the machines drilling through the earth are currently being slowed down by iron. However they will reach Zion in little over nine hours.

Soren, Niobe, Morpheus and their crews are gathered with the Keymaker. He tells them what they must do. Neo must go through the door that leads to the source. Before they must keep the entire building from exploding; to do this the electrical network providing energy to 27 square blocks must be disabled. Niobe and Ghost must therefore take out a power station while Soren and his crew deactivate the emergency network. This will give a five-minute window during which Neo must open the door. “All must be done at the same time. If one step fails, all fail,” the Keymaker instructs.

Back in the real world, while waiting to be time to go, Neo makes Trinity promise not to enter the Matrix. She agrees.

Niobe and Ghost succeed blowing the power station, but Soren and his crew are killed by Sentinels just before they accomplish their mission. Link and Trinity discover that there is a problem and so Trinity has to go in to finish their job.

As Neo sees the lights go out; together with Morpheus and the Keymaker they enter the hall of back door, where they are met by Smith.

Trinity enters the Matrix and all happens as in Neo’s dreams.

In the hallway Neo and Morpheus are assaulted by a horde of Smiths who try to take Morpheus’ body for their own, but Neo prevents it. In the heat of the battle the Keymaker sneaks around by using alternate doors and opens the one they seek just as the power grid fails again, thanks to Trinity. Neo grabs Morpheus and flies through the door. Unfortunately the Keymaker is gunned down by Smiths as he closes it again, and dies. Before taking his last breath he tells Morpheus which door to take to get home and gives Neo the key he needs to open the special door. Simultaneously an Agent is following Trinity without her knowledge. Neo enters the door of light.

Neo is now in a room where the walls are made up of old-fashioned television screens. In a chair, on the other side of the room, sits the Architect, the designer of the Matrix and the head of all operations related to it. Neo asks why he is there. The Architect explains that Neo is an anomaly in the Matrix program that he has been unable to remove. “You have not answered my question” Neo points out. The Architect agrees and says that he caught on faster than the others. The screens are all showing Neo expressing his thoughts, all express bewilderment by what the Architect means. “The Matrix is older than you know” the Architect explains. Apparently this is the sixth version. Neo has trouble accepting it but concludes that “either no one told me or no one knows.” “Precisely” says the Architect. The anomaly is essential to the equations the Architect builds the Matrix from. “Choice, the problem is choice” Neo realizes.

Just then Trinity is surprised by an Agent. She is no match for him and soon hits the floor.

The Architect describes the first Matrix which was perfect and therefore failed. The Architect tried again, making it reflect the human nature, but in vain. The problem was discovered by “an intuitive program, the Oracle, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche.” According to the Architect the Oracle discovered by chance that the humans had to be given choice. This leads them to Zion and Neo is with the Architect because it is about to be destroyed, a fact Neo cannot accept. The Architect simply points out that it is for the sixth time and they are getting better and better at it.

Trinity continues to battle the Agent, but is slowly being defeated.

The Architect explains that Neo must now return to the Source so that the “prime program can be launched. Then he must choose 23 people to rebuild Zion. If he does not do it the Matrix will crash due to system failure, killing everyone connected to it. As Zion is about to be destroyed that would mean the end of the human race. Neo points out that machines need humans to survive. “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept,” the Architect claims.

The Architect doubts however that Neo will accept the extinction of the human race. He explains that Neo’s five predecessors were designed to develop an attachment to their fellow human beings. Neo, on the other hand has a more specific aim for his affections. “Trinity!” Neo exclaims in a whisper. The screens are showing her predicament, and the Architect reveals that she entered the Matrix to save his life. The Architect presents Neo with two doors. The one to his right leads to the Source and the one on the left to Trinity and the downfall of man. The old man can tell that Neo’s feelings are blinding him from the “fact” that Trinity will die either way. As the Oracle predicted, Neo goes to the left, only stopping to threaten the Architect that he better hope they don’t meet again. “We won’t” reply the Architect.

Back in the real world Morpheus is just coming out of the Matrix. “We have a problem, sir,” says Link. “Oh, no,” exclaims Morpheus as he looks at Trinity’s body. Trinity is still battling the Agent, jumps through the window and falls. The Agent is close behind and jumps out too continuing shooting at her as predicted in Neo’s nightmares. Neo, flying faster than ever, catches her just in time while the agent hits a car, crushing it. Neo carrying Trinity lands on a rooftop and lays her down. She appears fatally wounded. Neo removes the bullet by manipulating the code of the Matrix, but Trinity’s heart stops. Neo refused to accept her death. Reaching through the code of the Matrix, he compresses her heart and restarts it. She awakens with a start and they kiss passionately. “I guess this makes us even,” she whispers.

Morpheus fails to understand why the prophecy has not come true. Neo tells him and the others that they have 24 hours to save Zion and that the prophecy was just another form of control, a lie. Morpheus has major difficulty accepting this, but soon their proximity alert sounds. The sentinels are just outside of EMP range. “It’s a bomb,” says Neo. They flee from the Nebuchadnezzar.

The sentinels release a tow bomb that hit the hovercraft. From a safe distance the crew see the Nebuchadnezzar blown apart by the powerful weapon. “I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream has gone from me,” Morpheus says, heartbroken. The Sentinels pursue them immediately and the humans run for their lives. Suddenly Neo stops:
–    “Something is different,” he says
–    “What” asks Trinity?
–    “I can feel them.”

As the Sentinels descend on them, Neo stops, extends his hands and destroys them in mid-air as if he were emitting an EMP. As soon as all the Sentinels are down he collapses. Just then the ship Hammer comes to their rescue. Aboard, Neo is lying unconscious in sickbay, Trinity at his side. In the conference room, the crew of the ship tell Morpheus and Link about the counterattack on the digging machines. It all sounded good, but someone screwed up. An EMP was triggered before they were in position and five ships were incapacitated. It was a slaughter. No one knows how it happened. The sole survivor now lies unconscious in the sickbay of the Hammer with Neo. It is Bane.

3.4 Revolution

This is the last movie of the serie. It was released in 2003. Bane/Smith and Neo are both in an unconscious state in the real world. The former is said to be merely asleep whereas the neural patterns of Neo are identical to those of people who are jacked into the Matrix although he is not. Morpheus is dispirited after the destruction of the Nebuchadnezzar and discovering the true nature of the Oracle at the end of the last film. Morpheus searches for Neo within the Matrix; although his un-jacked-body is in the real world, his mind and virtual body must still be in the Matrix. Neo is in fact trapped in a limbo: a subway station named “Mobil Avenue” (“Mobil” is an anagram for “Limbo”), a transition zone between the Matrix and the Source (the Machine mainframe). At this station, Neo meets a ‘family’ of programs of Indian origin. The little girl called Sati talks to Neo and her father tells Neo that Mobil Avenue is controlled by a program called The Trainman who, in turn, is an exile loyal only to The Merovingian. When Neo tries to board the train with the family, the Trainman refuses, and knocks him away from the train, telling Neo that he makes the rules down here.

Seraph contacts Morpheus on behalf of the Oracle who now resides in a different “shell”. The Oracle informs Morpheus and Trinity that Neo is trapped in the Mobil Avenue train station. Seraph, Morpheus, and Trinity pursue the Trainman to secure Neo’s release, but he escapes. Their only option now to free Neo is to go to Club Hel and confront the Merovingian. The three fight their way from the club’s parking garage to the coat check station. They engage some of the Merovingian’s guards, who are able to walk on ceilings and walls.

They force their way into a large dance hall, brandishing two guns each. The Merovingian, in a display of scornful admiration, tells them to hand over their guns and he’ll meet with them directly. The Merovingian demands “the eyes of the Oracle” in exchange for Neo’s release. Trinity however loses her patience and provokes a Mexican standoff in which she, Morpheus, Seraph and the Merovingian each have a gun to their heads, forcing the Merovingian to release Neo.

In Mobil Avenue, Neo tries to leave by running through the train tunnel but he simply runs back into the station from the opposite direction. Some time later, Trinity arrives and frees Neo.

Troubled by new visions of the Machine City, Neo decides to visit the Oracle one last time before returning to the real world. She informs him that being ‘The One’, upon visiting the Source (the Machine mainframe), he developed a connection with it. The Matrix and the rest of the Machine world are derived from the Source as well. Thus we learn that all of Neo’s abilities -both in and out of the Matrix- result from this connection. This is how Neo was able to stop the machines pursuing them after the Nebuchadnezzar was destroyed. However the end result of his lack of preparation was temporary confinement in Mobil Avenue.

The Oracle tells Neo that Smith (who is also growing in power) is his exact “opposite” and his “negative”. She also elaborates upon the relationship between her and the Architect (tellingly, each of them mutters an exasperated “Please!” when Neo asks them about the other). She tells Neo cryptically that “everything that has a beginning has an end” and warns that Smith’s power threatens not only the Matrix, but also the Source and eventually the Machine City. The Oracle states that the war is about to end “one way or another.”

After Neo takes leave of the Oracle, a large group of Smith clones arrives at her home. They successfully assimilate the unresisting Oracle, and having gained her powers of precognition, the new Smith cackles maniacally at the future he is seeing.

In the real world, the remaining crew of the Nebuchadnezzar and the Mjolnir (known also as “the Hammer”) encounter Niobe’s deactivated ship, the Logos and its crew. They successfully reactivate the ship and begin to interrogate the now awakened Bane, who claims he has no memory of the events of the earlier battle. After contemplating his visions, Neo announces that he needs a ship to travel to the Machine City, although he cannot explain why. Roland, the Mjolnir’s captain refuses, but Niobe (who was told by the Oracle that she would have to make a choice to help Neo or not), lets him take the Logos. Trinity decides to accompany Neo.

The two remaining crews decide to return to Zion in the one hovercraft left. To avoid the Sentinel army, they let Niobe pilot the Mjolnir through a series of service tunnels which are nearly impossible to navigate. Shortly after departure, the Mjolnir’s crew discover that Bane has murdered a crew member and is now hidden aboard the Logos. However they are unable to double-back in order to warn Trinity and Neo. Before the Logos can depart, Bane ambushes Trinity and takes her hostage. Neo fights Bane who reveals himself as a manifestation of Smith. During the struggle, Bane manages to blind Neo by cauterizing his eyes with a severed electric cable. Bane has now the upper hand but Neo, in spite of his blindness, can see Smith inside Bane as a fiery form. Neo finishes the fight by smashing Bane’s head with a jackhandle. He then releases Trinity, who pilots them towards the Machine City.

Niobe, with Morpheus as her co-pilot, flies the Mjolnir through the lowest tunnel system. Flying slowly and at low power to avoid detection, they make their way towards Zion. Unfortunately one of the craft’s hover pads collides with the debris on the floor of the tunnel and the noise is heard by the sentinels that immediately pursue the craft. The crew makes a valiant effort to fight them off; however, they overwhelm the ship and begin to damage it with cutting lasers. A small group of sentinels also rips off the craft’s communication’s antenna, making it impossible for them to tell Zion they’re coming.

In Zion, the defenders deployed the infantry armed with rocket launchers and Armoured Personnel Units (APU) to protect the dock from assault. However two giant drilling machines (diggers) breach the roof of the dock. A huge swarm of sentinels moved in, starting the ‘Battle of Zion’. Despite desperate efforts the APUs failed to hold the Dock and many were destroyed. Also defending the dock, Link’s wife, Zee, and her partner, Charra, used a rocket launcher to fight the sentinels and Diggers. Charra managed to blow the leg off a Digger, however it used another of its legs to stabilize itself. She was also able to disable another Digger for a short time but it was soon reactivated by more sentinels that recharged the massive machine. Zee was able to escape the sentinels; however, Charra was killed by them.

Captain Mifune failed to open the gate for the approaching Mjolnir and was attacked and viciously wounded by a swarm of sentinels. With his last breath he told Kid (who was renewing his ammunition supply at the time), to open the gate for the Mjolnir. Kid was reluctant at first, saying he did not complete yet the combat training needed only for Mifune to tell him, “Neither did I.” This gives Kid the courage to fight through a cloud of Sentinels, go near the gate and open it blowing up the counter-weights. Just as the remaining humans were about to be overwhelmed the Mjolnir bursts through the gate with further Sentinels shortly behind. By setting off an EMP it disabled all electronic equipment in the area and destroyed all the Sentinels present in the dome. However it also disabled the remainder of Zion’s defences. The humans were forced to gather what weapons they could find and fall back to the temple entrance, awaiting the next swarm of sentinels which will surely overwhelm them all.

Nearing the Machine City, Neo and Trinity fly over the harvesting fields where millions of humans produce energy for the city. They are attacked by Sentinels and the city’s defence system hurls numerous mobile bombs at the Logos. Neo uses the power given by his connection to the Source to destroy the incoming bombs. However, Sentinels are overwhelming the ship. To evade them Trinity flies the Logos as high as she can through an electrical storm cloud. The Sentinels are disabled, but the cloud also disables the ship’s engines. As the ship emerges temporarily above the cloud layer, Trinity gets a glimpse of real sunlight and blue sky. The ship then stalls and plummets back into the storm cloud in free-falls directly toward the Machine City. Trinity attempts to ignite the engines but it is too late and the ship crashes into a machine tower. The impact of the collision fatally wounds Trinity, and she dies in Neo’s arms.

Neo emerges into the Machine City to bargain with the machines personified by the ‘Deus Ex Machina’, a massive droid with a human child’s face that acts as the interface to The Source. Neo warns the machines that Smith, who has by now assimilated every human and programme within the Matrix, is beyond the machines’ control, and will soon assault the Source to which the Matrix is connected. He offers to help stop Smith in exchange for a ceasefire in Zion. The second wave of Sentinels in Zion instantly responds by standing still at the temple entrance. Neo openly confronts the Deus Ex Machina and negotiates with it, saying that in exchange for a peaceful coexistence, he will destroy Smith and his clones, which have infected most of the Machine City. The Deus insists that they don’t need Neo’s assistance, to which Neo says “If that’s true, then you should kill me now.” The Deus understands and provides a connection for Neo to enter the Matrix and confront Smith. The Deus Ex Machina still believes that Neo might fail to which Neo answers that he won’t.

The city is now populated by tens of thousands of Smith copies. Smith who now has the Oracle’s powers claims to have foreseen their victory. Smith’s clones stand by and watch while Neo and Smith square off. Fighting on the streets, through buildings and into the sky, they continually repel each other. While battling in the sky, Smith grabs Neo and plunges to the ground with him, creating a massive crater. The two continue to battle in the crater, seemingly to a standstill. Neo is eventually outmatched by Smith, who pauses to gloat that he has “seen the details of his victory before”. Trying to describe the details aloud, at one point he cannot remember what he was supposed to say next about his vision. Neo refuses to give up the fight, and a frustrated Smith continues to attack Neo until he is too badly hurt to go on. To both Smith and Neo’s surprise, Smith announces “everything that has a beginning has an end.” Hearing the Oracle’s parting advice again allows Neo to understand that Smith’s assimilation is not total, and baits the scared Smith into assimilating him. Neo’s final words to Smith are, “It was inevitable,” quoting Smith’s oft-spoken admonition. Smith’s assimilation of Neo is seemingly successful, and when the Oracle-Smith asks Neo-Smith whether it is over, he receives a nod and smile as reply.

Back in the Machine city, Neo’s body spasms as a surge of energy enters his body through the Matrix connection. Neo is returning to the source, and a white light begins to rip apart Smith from the inside out. One by one, similar to the destruction of Agent Smith at the end of The Matrix, the copies are destroyed too. The Sentinels that were about to attack the humans withdraw from Zion.

The Architect, upon meeting the Oracle, tells her that she “played a very dangerous game” by attempting to change the way the Matrix functioned. The Oracle responds by saying that she understood the risk and knew it was worth taking. In answer to the Oracle asks the Architect what will become of the humans who want to be unplugged from the Matrix, the Architect replies that “they will be freed.” The Oracle asks the Architect, “Do I have your word?” The Architect answers “What do you think I am, Human?”

The closing shot of the film depicts a new dawn in the Matrix world. The sky is now clear, the buildings are roads are back and the parks are green with grass and trees. Sati did it including the rainbow that she made especially for Neo. The rainbow represents a Covenant of God with Noah (Book of Genesis); Death (The Waters) will never destroy the world again. In this sense Death was Agent Smith who flooded the World with his hatred.

For the first and last time the ubiquitous green tint is absent.

Conclusions:

Agent Smith had infected all the programs controlling the Matrix. After his defeat the Matrix and the programs repaired themselves. But everything had changed leaving room for Sati to make her own important contribution; bringing back the sun and life on earth.

With the elimination of the Smiths, all the programs were back, including the Oracle. Neo, having sacrificed himself to save both the Machines and humans, is unplugged from the Matrix and his body is respectfully carried away by the Machines.