Neo (The Matrix)

Thomas Anderson
The Matrix character
First appearance	The Matrix
Created by	Wachowski Brothers
Portrayed by	Keanu Reeves (films), Andrew Bowen (voice in The Matrix: Path of Neo)
In-universe information
Alias	Neo
Species	Human
Gender	Male
Title	The One
Occupation	Hacker, The One (warrior), software engineer
Spouse	Trinity (deceased)
Nationality	American (in the virtual Matrix world)

Thomas A. Anderson (alias Neo) is a fictional character in The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions, as well as having a cameo in The Animatrix short film, Kid's Story. He was portrayed by Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Trilogy and The Animatrix. Andrew Bowen provided Neo's voice in The Matrix: Path of Neo.

Character Background

File:Neo-factsheet.png

Screenshot from the movie showing Mr. Anderson's Criminal record

Thomas A. Anderson was born on the 11 March 1962 in "Lower Downtown, Capital City, USA" according to his criminal record seen in the film. His mother was Michelle McGahey (who happened to be the art director on the first film. This is an Easter egg) and his father was John Anderson. He attended Central West Junior High and Owen Patterson High (named after the film's production designer, another easter egg).

The Matrix

At the start of the series, Thomas Anderson is one of billions of humans neurally 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" Metacortex; 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". It is described by Morpheus 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, Anderson spent his time trying to find the one man whom he thought could tell him what the Matrix was: a supposed terrorist known only as Morpheus. Anderson is suddenly contacted by Morpheus via a cellphone 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 contacted by Trinity, freed from the bug, and taken to meet Morpheus.

Neo is offered the choice to remain in his everyday life or to learn what the Matrix is. Accepting, 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, and naked in a pod of red liquid, in which he is connected to many wires.

Neo is rescued 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 around, Morpheus tells Neo the truth about the Matrix, about the real world, and about the fate of humanity. At first Neo refuses to believe him, but he ultimately embraces the truth. Afterward, Morpheus also tells Neo about the prophecy of The One, and how he believes that Neo is The One. The next day, Neo begins his "training", becoming knowledgeable in many forms of combat 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 and the existence of its Agents.

After several days aboard 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—"Your next life, maybe. Who knows?", telling him in this life he is not the one. The Oracle warns him that an event will come where he will have to choose between his own life or that of Morpheus, and that one of them will die.

On their way back to the phone, which serves as the exit for "redpills" to leave the matrix, the crew of Morpheus' ship are betrayed by Cypher. Morpheus is captured and held by Agents within the Matrix. Escaping death at the hands of Cypher, Neo and Trinity learn that the Agents seek to hack into Morpheus's brain, forcing him to tell them the access codes to the Zion mainframe. After refusing to sacrifice Morpheus (to prevent him from leaking the codes), Neo decides to attack the government building. 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 of ammo on Jones only to have every one of them be dodged effortlessly. When Jones returns fire, Neo proves to be capable of dodging bullets himself, fluidly moving in a way that only Agents were thought to be capable of moving. Jones is then shot by Trinity at point-blank range. Using an armed chopper, Neo and Trinity successfully rescue Morpheus from the floor of the building that he was on. Having just completed a successful rescue mission in a building protected by heavily armed guards and agents, a feat never before achieved, Morpheus takes this as evidence confirming that Neo is indeed The One, dismissing the Oracle's words by saying that she merely told Neo "exactly what you needed to hear". He further elaborates "Neo, soon you're going to realize just as I did, there is a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path" (this phrase is a clear Zen reference, one of the key influences of the film).

Reaching the hard line, Morpheus and Trinity return to the real world, but Neo is trapped by Agent Smith. Rather than run, Neo decides to stand his ground and fight Smith. Neo skillfully engages Smith in combat, almost seeming to be Smith's equal. In the end Neo is beaten by Smith's fists and is thrown on to the train tracks and holds Neo on the tracks as the train approaches, but Neo at the last minutes is able to get free from Smith and jumps from the tracks as Smith is ran over. Smith possesses the body of the driver and emerges from the train. Realizing that he cannot win this fight, Neo runs from the subway station.

Pursued by Smith and his fellow Agents, Neo is able to evade them and reach the location of the hard line, only to be ambushed and fatally shot by Smith. Trinity, seeing Neo's body die in the real world while his mind still in the Matrix, tells his apparently lifeless body that the Oracle had foretold that she would fall in love with The One. This is probably what the Oracle told Neo he was "waiting for", in that the term "next life" refers to his revival by Trinity's kiss, which restimulates his body. When the Agents try to kill him again, he holds out his hand and the bullets slow to a stop before him, and then drop 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 diving into the Agent's body (presumably a visible manifestation of his program) to destroy him from within, causing the other two agents with him to run away

Neo is then seen leaving a message for the machines via phone, a warning that Neo 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 go by between the events of The Matrix and the second film, The Matrix Reloaded. Neo is now fully confident in his ability to manipulate the artificial world within the Matrix: he can fly, has immense strength and speed, has telekinetic abilities, and is nearly invulnerable. He no longer uses firearms, preferring martial arts, and his ability to see the code of the Matrix makes him invulnerable to ambush. He and Trinity are now lovers. Dispensing with the long black trenchcoat and black shirt he wears at the conclusion of The Matrix, Neo now prefers a long coat with a high-rise mandarin collar that greatly resembles a cassock worn by clerics. Neo seeks more advice from the Oracle, unsure of his purpose, while Zion prepares for a massive attack from the Machines of over 250,000 Sentinels. 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.

As 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 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.

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 personification of the systems which create and design successive versions of 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. He saves her, just before she falls to the ground from the top floor of a powerplant. However, as she was shot before she fell, she dies of her wounds. It is at this point that Neo displays the ability to heal/resurrect a person, as he reaches into her virtual body and restarts 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 emplaced upon them, 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. Neo, realizing that he can now sense the sentinel, stays behind, and is able to deactivate the Sentinels by a hitherto unknown ability. The effort of doing so renders him unconscious.

He and the crew are rescued by the hovercraft Mjolnir/Hammer, the crew of which are dealing with a mystery in the form of Bane, a crewmember from another ship, who is the only survivor of an ill-fated attack by the Zion fleet. Unbeknownst to anyone, Bane has become caught and infected by a copy of the Smith program, which has allowed Smith to bring himself into the real world through Bane's mind.

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 to find himself caught in an isolated limbo only accessible by order of the Merovingian, from which his mind is unable to free itself. He remains trapped until freed by Trinity (assisted by Morpheus and Seraph), who threatens the Merovingian in a Mexican standoff unless Neo is freed.

Neo determines, through his new abilities of foresight, that in truth the Oracle's prophecy was correct in that The One was predetermined to return to the Source to stop the war. The Architect, however, altered the prophecy and forced Neo's predecessors to end their path with Zion's destruction and the reloading of the Matrix. After a final visit to the Oracle, Neo learns it is not the approaching Sentinels that he should fear, but Smith, whose clones are multiplying and threaten to destroy both the Matrix and the real world (i.e., humans and machines). 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 mankind was incorrect, due to his nature as a purely mathematical being. 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". Neo must now go to the heavily-guarded Machine City in hopes of stopping the Sentinels and Smith.

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 to Zion, which is now besieged and losing in the Machines' attack return to Zion. Neo and Trinity are ambushed by the stowaway Bane/Smith, who blinds Neo, 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 Machine construct, and offers Smith's destruction in exchange for a truce. The offer is accepted; Neo enters the Matrix to find that the Smith program has cloned itself throughout the simulated world, and has turned it into a rainswept dark simulation where copies of Smith exclude most other beings. One of the copies of Smith, having assimilated the Oracle, has become Neo's equal and therefore becomes his opponent. Their cataclysmic fight leaves Smith unable to defeat Neo, while Neo himself realizes that fighting will not win this battle. Therefore Neo sacrifices himself to Smith and allows Smith to seize victory by finally infecting Neo with the Smith program and turning Neo's mind and body into a Smith clone. Smith infecting Neo causes the destruction of all the Smiths and restores the Matrix.

Neo's body is respectfully 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.

As the movie ends, a black cat is seen walking down a destroyed sidewalk. It stops, appears to digitize as the Matrix is reloaded or restarted, and repeats and resumes its business. (This was an allusion to a scene where Neo sees a black cat appear twice in The Matrix, an indication that something has been changed within the Matrix code.)

Sati, a program smuggled into the Matrix, awakes, meets with the Oracle, and creates a colorful sunrise in honor of Neo. Sati asks the Oracle whether they will ever see Neo again, with the Oracle responding; "I suspect so", hinting the fact that Neo may not actually be dead. The Architect approaches the Oracle and agrees to release all humans from the Matrix who desire release.

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 telekinesis, 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 less than 15 minutes (2,000 miles per hour), implying that his "cruising speed" is in excess of three times the speed of sound. 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.

Further, Neo possesses superhuman strength and agility, and is able to survive attacks that would kill or disable a normal human being with relative ease. His reflexes are great enough to dodge bullets. Although he could block a sword with the edge of his hand, he received a small cut, 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, and upon exiting the Matrix, he appeared visibly tired.

Neo has displayed the ability of resurrecting the recently deceased (though the extent and limits of this ability are not known).

A more subtle application of Neo's ability is a heightened awareness of the simulated nature of the Matrix, enabling him to easily detect Agents, Exiles, and other anomalous phenomena (such as the presence of explosives). He is even capable of a limited form of precognition. The ability to see the Matrix's inner workings has been nicknamed "Code Vision". This has been described as "seeing the world without time", or visualizing possible futures like a chess player looking several moves ahead.

In addition, Neo (like most Red Pills) utilizes the Resistance's combat programs, which grant combat abilities equivalent to a martial artist with decades of experience. Neo is able to run an unprecedented number of these programs simultaneously; he is therefore a master of every known martial art and fighting style, including but not limited to Kung Fu, Jujitsu, Karate, Eskrima, Drunken Boxing, and Taekwondo (the Nebuchadnezzar's ship operator Tank uploads each of these martial arts programs to Neo's brain during his training in the first movie). In training for the series, Keanu Reeve's fighting arsenal, as well as the entire cast's, emphasizes Wushu.

In the real world, Neo does not display any of the above mentioned abilities. Neo does has 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. 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.

In Path of Neo, Neo can heal from most injuries at a very fast pace.

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 themselves, 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 cumulation 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.

See also

• Simulated reality

External links

• Template:Imdb character
• The Matrix Trilogy: A Man-Machine Interface Perspective: a study of the trilogy from a strictly technological as opposed to philosophical viewpoint