Plot Summary 

    Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is leading two lives. On the one hand, he is a software program writer for a reputable software company, and the other he is a hacker, who goes by the alias Neo. He spends night after night troubled by a question that he doesn’t know who to get an answer from: What is the "Matrix". He is tracked down by Trinity, (Carrie Anne Moss), sent by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne),who has spent much of his life searching for Neo, as he believes Neo is The One. When Neo finally meets Trinity at a club, she tells him about Morpheus, and that Morpheus wanted to see him. At work the next day Neo receives a package from Morpheus, a cell phone, through which Morpheus helps him evade the "agents" who have come looking for him in his office. When Neo refuses to walk along a ledge out of a window to escape, he is taken captive by these agents. At the police station, Agent Smith offers a bribe in return for Neo’s cooperation, and when Neo refuses, the Agents plant an electronic tracking device into his body through his navel. Neo wakes up the next morning, unclear whether the events of the day before were real or not. He is contacted by Morpheus, who tells him how to meet him, and Neo is picked up by Trinity, Switch and Apok, who painfully remove the tracking device through a electric suction instrument. Neo is then taken to see Morpheus.

    Morpheus is very pleased to meet Neo, and at Neo’s request, begins to explain to him what the Matrix really was: a computer generated "virtual reality" drawn over the eyes of the masses of the world, while in reality, the world was a wasteland with a "scorched sky". The "Machines" now ruled the world, and because they could not generate energy through the sun, they "harvested" human beings for energy. This was why the Matrix was needed, to keep control. Morpheus continues to explain that nothing in the Matrix was truly real, that all that people sensed in the Matrix was artificially generated electric signals that let people believed that what they felt and saw and touched was "real". "The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep humans under control in order to change a human being into" a battery. The Agents were computer programs that served to eliminate all obstacles preventing the Matrix from functioning smoothly, and so Morpheus and crew ran from them. They were practically impossible to defeat. Morpheus’s crew travel into and out of the Matrix through phone lines. Neo cannot handle the immensity of the reality he was faced with; he proceeds to throw up and pass out.

    When Neo comes to he is readied for "training". Morpheus believes that he is THE ONE. He has been searching for Neo all his life because he believed that The One would free everyone from the elusive Matrix. Neo trains, and then Morpheus walks him through more training programs, attempting to educate him about the Matrix, and get him to "free" his mind. He then takes him to see the Oracle.

    During this time Cypher is getting tired of life outside the Matrix. He is collaborating with the Agents to give them Morpheus, and in exchange he wants to be put back into the Matrix, with no recollection of his life in the "real world". He told the Agents that he would give them his location, by leaving his phone traceable while in the Matrix. (The Agents could pinpoint the location of Morpheus’s team by tracking the signals of their cell phones, which was why Morpheus’s crew are hesitant to use their phones unless for an emergency). When they enter the Matrix to see the Oracle, Cypher dials a number and throws his phone away, online.

    The Oracle tells Neo that he could be the one, but he seems to be waiting for something. She then tells him that he will eventually have to make a tough decision, a decision between his life and Morpheus’s.

    On the way back, the Agents are waiting for them. They trap and kill Mouse, the sounds of the gunshots alert the others, and they run and hide in the walls of the building. Cypher coughs at a highly inopportune moment, giving away their hiding place, and Morpheus is taken captive, giving up his life to save Neo. Cypher is the first to get back onto the ship, and once aboard, refuses to let anyone back on the ship, having blasted Tank with a pulse gun. He then proceeds to kill Apoc and Switch, and Dozer. Tank, wounded but not dead, comes to, and turns the pulse gun back on Cypher. Cypher is killed. Tank lets Neo and Trinity back on the ship, battered and distraught.

    Once back at the ship, Neo plans to go back in and rescue Morpheus. Trinity decides to go with him. Equipping themselves with several sets of guns, they re-enter the Matrix, and walk into the lobby of the building in which Morpheus is being held. After a bloody battle, they make it onto the roof, from where the steal and then fly a helicopter along the side of the building to the window where they could see Morpheus. Neo starts shooting lines of bullets into the room at the Agents,  so that Morpheus could break out of his bonds and escape while the Agents are dodging bullets. In a very dramatic sequence of events, Morpheus gets wounded in the crossfire, in the leg, Neo jumps out of the helicopter attached to a harness to catch Morpheus as he leaps towards the helicopter. Trinity flies the helicopter close to the tops of surrounding buildings, and  Morpheus drops to safety. She proceeds to crash the helicopter, whose gas tank has been shot, and escapes just in time.

    Neo, Morpheus and Trinity are directed to a telephone at an underground railway station by Tank, and while Morpheus and Trinity leave the Matrix, Agent Smith arrives to fight Neo. Battered and bruised by the battle’s end, Neo leaves running, after having been nearly killed fighting the first time, calling Tank for directions on how to get out of there. Tank sends him to a room in a building, the Agents are hot in pursuit. Neo turns a corner to come face to face with Smith, who shoots him repeatedly in the chest. Neo sinks to the floor.

    Back at the ship, machines are breaking into the hull of the ship, having noticed the ship’s lights and come to seek and destroy. Morpheus, Trinity and Tank anxiously wait for Neo to arise, and when he dies, Morpheus is shattered. Trinity leans over Neo’s body in the chair, and whispers to him that the Oracle had told her that she would fall in love with The One, and that since she loved Neo, he couldn’t be dead. She kisses Neo, and Neo awakens in the Matrix. The Agents see him arise, shoot bullets at him, but something has changed. Neo now stops the bullets in midair, and he starts to see the Matrix for what it is. He then destroys the Agent Smith program, the other two Agents flee. Trinity screams for Neo to return so that they could send out an electromagnetic pulse to kill the sentinels, which they couldn’t do until Neo was back on the ship. Neo returns just as the pulse is sent out. The sentinels are destroyed.

    In the last scene of the movie, Neo talking to someone on the phone, saying something similar to what Morpheus had said to him. He then takes off and flies.

    The Matrix is about an internal journey of self discovery of the protagonist Neo. It concerns his enlightenment about the conditions he actually lives in, as well as it is a process by which he comes to terms with the understanding that reality as he knew it was a complete farce. In this movie, Neo challenges the foundations on which he bases reality, what he sees and hears and touches, telling him that it’s not real.

    The majority of The Matrix is viewed in chronological order, with the exception of the section in which Morpheus explains to Neo what had truly happened to the world as we know it. The film’s themes and premises build on each other, and therefore by the events unfolding before our very eyes, we are part of the revolution. The point of view switches back and forth between all the characters of the story: It moves from Neo, in the beginning (emphasized with our literally seeing through Neo’s eyes through the peephole, when his friend comes to pick up the illegal program Neo has made for him, at the very start of the movie), to Trinity when she follows Morpheus’s orders, to Morpheus himself at the time of his dialogue about what the Matrix really is, to Cypher in his time of betrayal, to Mouse, at the time of his killing, and so on. The majority of the narration is through the eyes of Neo, however, and since the narrative structure is not of the limited type, the audience learns what is really going on along with Neo. Since the movie is about Neo’s self discovery of him being the One, this building understanding of the audience about the Matrix parallels the building understanding of Neo about himself and his potential. Also the breathtaking special effects of the movie mirror how spectacular the Matrix must look to Neo himself, thereby rendering a double learning process of both Neo as well as the audience. The end movie is set up to allow for the sequels to follow.

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