Neo (The Matrix)
Neo is a fictional character and the protagonist of The Matrix franchise, created by the Wachowskis. He was portrayed as a cybercriminal and computer programmer by Keanu Reeves in the films, 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 2021, Reeves reprised his role in The Matrix Resurrections with what Vulture calls "his signature John Wick look".
In 2008, Neo was selected by Empire as the 68th Greatest Movie Character of All Time. "Neo" is also an anagram of "one", a reference to his destiny of being The One who would bring peace. There are claims that a nightclub in Chicago inspired the name of the character. Neo is considered to be a superhero.
Fictional character biography
Thomas A. Anderson was born in Lower Downtown, Capital City, USA on March 11, 1962, according to his criminal record, or September 13, 1971 according to his passport. His mother was Michelle McGahey and his father was John Anderson. He attended Central West Junior High and Owen Patterson High. 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 simulated reality.
''The Matrix''
In his normal life, he is a quiet programmer for the "respectable software company" Meta Cortex, while in private, he is a computer hacker who penetrates computer systems illicitly and steals information under his hacker alias "Neo". 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".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. After an encounter with another hacker, Trinity, 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 cooperate 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, 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 the latter option, he takes a drug, which is actually a program designed to disrupt his mind's neural connection to the Matrix and make it easier for his real body to be found and awakened in the real world. He wakes up disoriented and alarmed to find himself naked, weak, and hairless in a pod full of what can be assumed to be an artificial amniotic fluid. He also discovers that he is connected to a series of thick cables, by way of a number of plugs that are grafted to his body, including one plugged directly into the base of his skull, which is later explained as the means through which his mind was connected to the Matrix. Upon his "birthing" into the real world, he is discovered by a machine that grabs him by the neck and removes all of his plugs and cables before flushing him out of his fluid tank down into the cold sewers below the Earth's surface.
Neo is rescued by Morpheus, and his body is healed of the effects of his atrophy incurred while inside the pod. Once Neo regains consciousness and mobility, Morpheus tells Neo the truth about the Matrix; it is a simulated world to which humans are connected, "a prison for your mind", as stated by Morpheus, while unknown to them, their bodies are used as a power source for a race of sentient machines that, ironically, mankind created. 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 eventually masters 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 informed of the existence of its agents, programs designed by the machines to maintain order and dominance over the human race, created with abilities such as dodging bullets, running at high speeds, jumping great distances, and physically possessing people in the Matrix. If killed, they simply find a new host to overcome.
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 a landline phone, 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 mentally erased and reconnected permanently to the Matrix as an escape from the real world's bleakness. In the Matrix, SWAT troops kill Mouse. Cypher jacks out and 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 that the Agents seek to hack into Morpheus's brain in order to force him to tell them the access codes to the mainframe computer within humanity's last refuge, the city of 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, although he is not yet as fast as them, as his leg is grazed by a bullet. 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, Tank and Morpheus both believe that 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 landline phone, 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. Neo and Smith 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. However, the agent possesses the body of the conductor and emerges from the train. 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 landline phone, just to be ambushed and fatally shot in the chest 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 is revived, finally fully emerging as the One. When 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. Completely believing in his new-found 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, warning that he plans to oppose them by freeing as many human minds as possible. He then hangs up and flies into the sky, now having completely made his final metamorphosis into becoming the One.
''The Matrix Reloaded''
Approximately six months have passed since the events of the first film, and Neo, now Trinity's lover and fully confident in his powers as the One, is able to tremendously manipulate the artificial world within the Matrix. He no longer requires firearms, relying solely on hand-to-hand combat. His ability to influence 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. 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, numbered precisely relative to the population of Zion of 250,000 people. The Oracle directs him on a quest to find the Keymaker, a personified program that has access to numerous backdoors within the system and 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 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; he is 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, being trapped in the Merovingian's mansion five hundred miles away in the mountains. He flies off to help them and only just arrives in time to save Morpheus and the Keymaker from two agents crashing two trucks 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 jeopardized by the agents of the Matrix, illustrating 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 and also ensures its constant stability.
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 because not every human accepts the simulated reality and if enough of them accumulate, it could cause a catastrophic system crash of the Matrix and subsequent extinction of both humanity and the Machines. The Oracle is as much part of that self-perpetuating design as the Architect 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 does 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 Neo and the others are forced to abandon it and flee as it is destroyed. As they flee, Neo suddenly discovers that he can now sense the sentinels and shuts them down telepathically; however, the effort causes him to fall unconscious. He and the crew are rescued by the hovercraft Mjolnir whose crew 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's mind was destroyed by Smith at some point during the movie's events during which Smith overwrote himself over Bane's avatar, effectively killing Bane and once he was unplugged, taking over Bane's real body.