Neo (The Matrix)

Neo
The Matrix character
First appearance	The Matrix
Last appearance	The Matrix Revolutions
Created by	The Wachowskis
Portrayed by	Keanu Reeves (films)
Voiced by	Andrew Bowen (The Matrix: Path of Neo)
Information
Nickname(s)	The Anomaly (name for him given by the machines) Mr. Anderson (Agent Smith calls him by his Matrix name)
Aliases	Thomas A. Anderson
Species	Human
Gender	Male
Occupation	Hacker The One, an anagram for Neo(warrior) Former software engineer (in the Matrix simulation)
Title	The One
Family	Michelle McGahey-Anderson (mother) John Anderson (father)
Significant other(s)	Trinity
Nationality	American
fighting style	Budo Krav Maga Wushu

Neo (born as Thomas A. Anderson, also known as The One, an anagram for Neo) is a fictional character and the main protagonist in The Matrix franchise. He was portrayed by Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Trilogy, as well as having a cameo in The Animatrix short film 'Kid's Story'. Andrew Bowen provided Neo's voice in The Matrix: Path of Neo. In 2008, Neo was selected by Empire as the 16th Greatest Movie Character of All Time.^[1] Neo is also an anagram of "one", a reference to his destiny of being The One who would bring peace.^[2] There are claims that a nightclub in Chicago inspired the name of the character in the Matrix.^[3][4]

Fictional character biography

A record from Agent Smith's file on Neo and Neo's passport show a difference in the birthday of the character.

Thomas A. Anderson was born in Lower Downtown, Capital City, USA on March 11, 1962 (so, in the real world near 2162) according to his criminal record, or September 13, 1971 according to his passport (both seen in the film). His mother was Michelle McGahey (the name of the first film's art director^[5]) and his father was John Anderson. He attended Central West Junior High and Owen Patterson High (named after the film's production designer). In high school, he excelled at science, math and computer courses, and displayed an aptitude for literature and history. Although he had disciplinary troubles when he was thirteen to fourteen years old, Anderson went on to become a respected member of the school community through his involvement in football and hockey.

At the start of the series, Neo is one of billions of humans neurally connected to the Matrix, unaware that the world he lives in is a virtual reality.^[6]

The Matrix

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", and he also sells illegal untraceable computer systems and hacking programs along with controlling computer viruses stashed on CDs and diskettes. During his time as a hacker, Anderson has learned about something known only as "The Matrix". It is described as a vague notion that Neo has felt his whole life that "there is something wrong with the world".

During the years prior to the events of The Matrix, Neo has spent his time trying to find the one man who he thought could tell him what the Matrix was: a supposed terrorist known only as Morpheus. Anderson is suddenly contacted by Morpheus via a cell phone mailed to his office, but is almost immediately captured by the virtual reality's Agents, led by Agent Smith. After refusing to co-operate with the agents, Neo has an electronic bug implanted within his Matrix-simulated body so that his actions can be tracked and those seeking to make contact from the free world can be traced and destroyed. He is then contacted by Trinity,^[7] freed from the bug, and taken to meet Morpheus.

Neo is offered a choice to remain in his everyday life and forget about the Matrix or to learn what the Matrix really is. Choosing to learn what the Matrix really is, he takes a drug (commonly called the "red pill") designed to disrupt his body's neural connection to the Matrix, and wakes up disoriented and alarmed to find himself weak, hairless, naked in a pod full of red liquid, and connected to many wires.

Neo is rescued in the real world and his body is healed of the effects of his atrophy suffered in the power plant. Once Neo regains consciousness and is able to walk, Morpheus tells Neo the truth about the Matrix: that it is a simulated world to which humans are connected, and that humanity is used as a power source for giant intelligent machines. He also tells Neo about The One, a human with the power to manipulate The Matrix, who has been foretold to end the war between humans and machines, and says that he believes Neo is The One. The next day, Neo begins his "training" and becomes knowledgeable in many forms of combat, as well as vehicle and weapons operations, by having various training programs uploaded directly into his brain. He also receives further instruction from Morpheus on subjects such as "freeing his mind" from the restrictions of the Matrix, essentially overcoming the physics engine the Matrix operates on. He is also made aware the existence of its Agents.

After several days aboard Morpheus' hovercraft, the Nebuchadnezzar, Neo is taken to meet the Oracle, who has the power of foresight within the simulated world. She tells him that he has the "gift", but appeared to be waiting for something, and that in his present life he is not the one. The Oracle warns him that a situation will arise when he will have to choose between saving his own life or that of Morpheus.

Returning from the Oracle to the hard line, which serves as the exit for "red pills" to leave The Matrix, the crew of Morpheus's ship is betrayed by Cypher, a "red pill" who is willing to give the agents Morpheus in exchange for the promise of being reconnected permanently to the Matrix as an escape from the real world's bleakness. In the Matrix, SWAT troops kill Mouse. Cypher jacks out, grabs a real-world lightning gun, injuring Tank and killing Dozer. He kills Apoc and Switch, who remain jacked in, by prematurely terminating their connections. In the Matrix, Smith defeats and captures Morpheus. Neo and Trinity try to jack out but Cypher threatens to unplug them too, however he is thwarted when Tank recovers, killing Cypher and helping Neo and Trinity jack out.

Neo learns the Agents seek to hack into Morpheus's brain, forcing him to tell them the access codes to the mainframe in the hidden rebel city Zion. After refusing to sacrifice Morpheus to prevent this, Neo decides to jack in and attack the building where he is being held. He and Trinity proceed to fight their way to the roof level of the building, where they are confronted by Agent Jones. Neo unloads two entire magazines on Jones as he dodges each bullet effortlessly. When Jones returns fire, Neo proves capable of dodging bullets himself, fluidly moving in a way only an agent was thought to be capable of. Trinity then shoots Jones at point-blank range. Using an armed chopper, Neo and Trinity successfully rescue Morpheus. As Neo has just successfully rescued comrades from a building protected by heavily armed guards and agents (thought to be an unprecedented feat), Tank and Morpheus both believe Neo is indeed The One. Neo tries to tell Morpheus what the Oracle told him, but Morpheus explains that she merely told Neo what he needed to hear: had he believed himself to be the One, he would likely not have attempted the rescue, which was a necessary step to his emergence as the One.

Reaching the hard line, Morpheus and Trinity return to the real world, but Neo is trapped by Agent Smith. Trinity admonishes Neo to run, but he stands his ground, having begun to believe that he may be the One. The two of them draw guns and fire them empty, but are able to effortlessly dodge each other's fire. Neo skillfully engages Smith in hand-to-hand combat, almost seeming to be Smith's equal. In the end Neo is briefly incapacitated and held by Smith as a subway train approaches, but at the last minute he is able to get free and backflip up onto the platform, leaving Smith to be run over. The Agent, however, possesses the body of the conductor and emerges from the train and Neo, realizing that the Agents' ability to possess other bodies makes this a fight he cannot win, flees the subway station.

Pursued by Smith and his fellow Agents, Neo is able to evade them and reach the location of the hard line, just to be ambushed and fatally shot by Smith. Trinity, seeing Neo die in the real world while his mind is still in the Matrix, tells his evidently lifeless body that the Oracle had foretold that she would fall in love with The One. When kissed by Trinity, Neo comes back to life, finally fully emerging as The One. The Agents try to kill him again, Neo simply raises his hand and the bullets freeze in mid-air, then drop harmlessly to the ground. It is then shown that he is able to perceive, interpret, and alter the computer code of the Matrix. Fully believing in his newfound powers, he effortlessly fends off Agent Smith before forcing himself into the agent's body and destroying it from within. The other two agents quickly flee.

Neo is then seen leaving a message for the machines via phone; a warning that he plans to oppose the machines by freeing as many human minds as possible. He then hangs up and flies into the sky.

The Matrix Reloaded

Approximately six months between the events of the first film and The Matrix Reloaded, Neo is now fully confident in his ability to manipulate the artificial world within the Matrix. Not surprisingly, he no longer uses firearms and instead prefers martial arts. His ability to manipulate the coding of the Matrix allows him to stop incoming fire from multiple attackers. Dispensing with the long black trenchcoat and black shirt he wears at the conclusion of The Matrix, Neo now prefers a cassock with a high-rise mandarin collar giving the appearance of a priest or Bishop. He and Trinity are now lovers. Neo seeks more advice from the Oracle, unsure of his purpose, while Zion prepares for a massive attack by the Machines from over 250,000 Sentinels – giant jellyfish-like machines. The Oracle directs him on a quest to find the Keymaker, a personified program that has access to numerous backdoors within the system. The Keymaker will be able to lead Neo safely to the Source, the programming heart of the machine world, which contains the programs sustaining the Matrix.

After the Oracle leaves, Agent Smith (now known simply as Smith) appears, and it is revealed that Neo had separated Smith from the rest of the Matrix code by shattering him, giving him a life independent of the machine's systems, and now the two of them share a "connection" to each other. Smith is no longer an Agent of the Matrix, but has become more virus-like, able to insert his code into other systems and infect other programs and human minds to make copies of himself. Neo fends off hundreds of these Smiths and escapes. Later, he, Morpheus, and Trinity steal the Keymaker from his keeper, The Merovingian. During this time, Neo stays behind to fight off the Merovingian's men and becomes separated from the others. He flies off to help them and only arrives in time to save Morpheus and the Keymaker from two agents crashing two semis together.

The Keymaker explains that two power stations elsewhere in the Matrix must be disabled in a short time window to successfully disable the security system of a building where the door to the Source will appear, allowing Neo to reach it. This task is accomplished; but the Keymaker is killed, a hovercraft is destroyed, and Trinity is put in jeopardy by Agents of the Matrix; a vision that Neo has seen earlier in his dreams. Entering the door, Neo finds himself confronted by the Architect, a program which created and designed The Matrix.

The Architect presents Neo with a radically different explanation of his origins and purpose, claiming that Neo is actually the sixth "One". He goes on to say that Zion has been destroyed by the machines five times before; faced with the dilemma of allowing humanity to be destroyed, or allowing the machines' preferred status quo to be reconstructed, Neo's five predecessors have helped reload, or restart the Matrix, before being allowed to rebuild Zion with a handful of freed humans. The productive output of the Matrix is based upon this repeated cycle of destruction and recreation, to keep the human minds which power it in a stable structure. The Oracle is as much part of that self-perpetuating design as the Architect, Neo is told, and the prophecy of The One is designed to ensure it runs smoothly each time.

The Architect warns of the annihilation of all human life in and out of the Matrix if he did not enter the Source door to reload the Matrix, but unlike his predecessors, Neo does not enter the door to the Source; he chooses not to believe the Architect's dire warnings of consequences, and to save Trinity instead. Returning to the Matrix, he catches Trinity as she falls from an upper-story window of a power plant. She dies of a gunshot wound to the heart that she sustains during the fall, but Neo brings her back to life by reaching into her virtual body, removing the bullet, and restarting her heart.

Together, they exit the Matrix and return to the real world. Neo tells Morpheus that the Prophecy was merely another system of control, and that Zion's destruction is imminent. A group of Sentinels begin to converge on their hovercraft, so that Neo and the others are forced to abandon it and flee as it is destroyed. Neo stays behind, realizing that he can now sense the Sentinels, and stops them from attacking by force of will; however, the effort causes him to fall unconscious. He and the crew are rescued by the hovercraft Mjolnir (also known as the Hammer), the crew of which is dealing with a mystery in the form of Bane, a crew member from another ship, who is the only survivor of an ill-fated attack by the Zion fleet. Unbeknownst to anyone, Bane has been caught and infected by Smith.

The Matrix Revolutions

The Matrix Revolutions begins immediately after the events of the second movie. As a result of his struggle with the Sentinels, Neo returns to consciousness finding himself caught in an isolated train station-like limbo only accessible by order of the Merovingian, from which his mind is unable to free itself. It is here that he meets Sati, a young program created without a purpose who is being smuggled into the Matrix by her parents, who are also programs in the machine world. Neo remains trapped until freed by Trinity (assisted by Morpheus and Seraph) who threatens the Merovingian in a Mexican standoff.

After a final visit to the Oracle, Neo learns that he has powers over the machines which extend beyond the Matrix and that Smith is spreading, threatening to destroy both the Matrix and the real world. Building on the Oracle's previous explanations about the nature of choice, Neo learns that the Architect's assertion that his choice to save Trinity would inherently lead to the extinction of humankind was incorrect, due to his nature as a purely mathematical being rendering him incapable of seeing past choices made by humans as he considers them mere variables in equations. Having told Neo that he now has the power to choose to end the war and defeat Smith, the Oracle then states "Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo" and informs him that he must now go to the heavily guarded Machine City in hopes of stopping the Sentinels and Smith. Soon after Neo leaves, dozens of Smiths come and assimilate Seraph, Sati, and the Oracle.

Neo and Trinity are given the Logos, a hovercraft commanded by Morpheus's former lover, Niobe, in what seems to others as a suicidal journey to the Machine City. Meanwhile, Captain Roland and the Nebuchadnezzar's surviving crew of Link and Morpheus in the hovercraft Hammer/Mjolnir return to Zion, which is now besieged and losing to the Machines. Neo and Trinity are ambushed by the stowaway Bane/Smith, who blinds Neo with an electric cable, but is killed when Neo discovers an ability to 'see' programs and Machines independently of his eyesight. Neo, with Trinity as pilot, guide the Logos past the Machine City's defenses, but in the effort the Logos crash-lands, and Trinity sustains fatal injuries and dies.

Neo encounters the Deus Ex Machina, a giant Machine construct and the de facto leader of the Machines. He offers Smith's defeat and destruction in exchange for a truce. The offer is accepted; Neo enters the Matrix to find that the Smith program has copied itself throughout the simulated world, and has turned it into a rainswept dark simulation. One of the copies of Smith, having assimilated the Oracle and obtained as much freedom and control over the virtual world as Neo, faces Neo alone. For a while, the two fight evenly with no real advantage, but ultimately, the tireless Smith begins to wear out Neo and takes control of the fight. Realizing he cannot win with brute force, Neo allows Smith to assimilate him, which enables the machines to eradicate the Smith virus directly through his body, apparently killing him.

Neo's body is taken away by the Machines in the Machine City, while below in Zion, the Machines stop their attack and retire in deference to the peace that Neo bartered. The matrix is rebooted and a beautiful sunrise appears over the horizon, created by Sati in Neo's honor.

The Matrix Online

Although the fate of Neo was never truly revealed in the MMORPG sequel, The Matrix Online, his influence nevertheless had a strong impact on several key events throughout the game.

In the beginning, scattered code fragments of Neo's "RSI" (Residual Self Image) were found on the bodies of the impostor Agents who appeared across the Mega City during Chapter 1.1 (later revealed to be Sentinels under the command of The General program). When held, these fragments echoed some of the final thoughts of Neo inside the redpill's mind. Each of the three main post-war political organizations inside the Matrix realized the possible significance of these fragments and began fighting amongst themselves to gather as many as they could.

The Oracle reveals a secret society of exiles known only as the Shapers, who are the only ones able to bring the Fragments together in any significant way and that they must be protected from the impostor agents' corruption. The redpills' distrust and organizational differences prove too much for any strong unity, so that a Shaper fell into the captivity of the false agents. His power was used to encode some part of The One's being onto them, creating the powerful, pale-skinned "N30 Ag3nts".

In Chapter 1.2, Morpheus states that though the Machines never returned Neo's physical remains (Neo's body in the real world) to Zion, they did not "recycle" them: a reference to the first film, in which Morpheus tells Neo that the machines liquefy deceased occupants of the Matrix to provide organic sustenance for its living inhabitants. This would be the driving force behind Morpheus' descent into fanatical terrorism against the System in an attempt to force the Machines to reveal Neo's fate, ultimately leading to his assassination.

The subject of Neo then fell to the side lines for other struggles until the arrival of The Oligarchs in Chapter 9. The original intruder, Halborn, was notably intrigued by the life of The One and was personally shocked about the implications of Neo's ability to affect Machines outside of the simulation had on his search for what he called "The Biological Interface Program".

After Halborn's removal in Chapter 10, little more was questioned until the revelation of the Trinity project, originally headed by The Oracle, in Chapter 12. It was revealed that both Neo and Trinity were actually the culmination of decades of Machine research into translating human DNA perfectly into Machine code, allowing them to interface directly with technology without the need for simulated interfaces.

Powers and abilities

Neo has carried, since his inception, the Matrix's source code known as the Prime Program. This gives him the ability to freely manipulate the simulated reality of the Matrix, similar to the authority a system administrator has over a given system. He manifests these abilities as various superhuman powers.

The power Neo exhibits most often is akin to telekinesis in the Matrix. In that, he seems capable of manipulating any object in the Matrix through will alone. By focusing this ability upon himself, he can fly at amazing speeds and jump great distances. Whilst his speed is never specified, he flies from the Merovingian's mountain manor to the highway "500 miles due south" in a very short time. His speed of flight is further exemplified by his ability to escape explosions, and the sonic boom left in his wake has the power to overturn rows of heavy vehicles. He has used this ability multiple times to stop several bullets in mid flight, first against the Agents and again against the Merovingian.

In addition to his abilities, Neo possesses superhuman strength and agility, and is near-invulnerable to most attacks. Although, despite this, whilst he could block a sword with the edge of his hand, he still received a small cut where he made contact with the sword, indicating (as the Merovingian pointed out) that he was still human despite his powers. His endurance is also finite: when confronted by masses of Smith clones in the second film, Neo was forced to escape rather than continue fighting through he easily overpowered at least 40 Smith clones and threw about 50 of him, and upon being disconnected from the Matrix, he appeared exhausted and winded. His reflexes are great enough to dodge bullets. Neo's strength and speed level have never been accurately measured, the level of speed he showed in the 2nd movie he could move at Mach 8 regularly and Mach 10 under stress also he could generate enough force to destroy buildings and take similar impacts but he is vulnerable to heat and sharpness. By the third movie his full strength is shown when Neo fights Smith and his punches are faster than lightning, and he generated enough force to make an entire barrier of water form around him that was as big as several city blocks Neo could also withstand that punch and his own.

In the real world, Neo does not display any of the aforementioned abilities aside from fighting skills. Neo does have some degree of wireless connectivity with the Matrix system: he eventually learns to sense the presence of the Machines, and even interfere with their function. This capability overwhelms him at first after he disables a squad of sentinels, causing him to collapse and sends him to limbo without the equipment normally used by the Resistance due to him still being inexperienced with his powers. According to the Oracle, "The power of The One extends beyond the Matrix. It reaches from here all the way back to where it came from." Apparently because of his status as The One, he has a direct connection to the Source, and can therefore affect everything connected to it. After he is blinded in the fight against Smith/Bane, Neo begins to perceive everything connected to the Source, including the Machine City itself, as silhouettes of golden light; he is thus able to "see" Smith/Bane and kill him.

Reception

Williams argues that Neo is presented as being Alice in Wonderland through the first film - being told to 'follow the white rabbit', and that his innocence feminises him.^[8]

References

External links

Look up Appendix:The Matrix/Neo in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Neo at the Internet Movie Database
• The Matrix Trilogy: A Man-Machine Interface Perspective: a study of the trilogy from a strictly technological as opposed to philosophical viewpoint
• The System (Power Matrix)
• The Matrix