Neo

Neo spends his nights trying to find out what the Matrix is. Trinity tracks him down and tells him Morpheus has the answers. At work, Agents led by Agent Smith come for him. Morpheus guides him over the phone, but Neo gives himself up. In the interrogation, the Agents seal his mouth shut and plant a robotic tracking bug in his stomach. Neo wakes up at home thinking it was a nightmare, until Trinity removes the bug and takes him to Morpheus.

Morpheus offers a choice: the blue pill sends him back to his normal life, the red pill shows him the truth. Neo takes the red pill and wakes up in the real world, in a pod full of cables, surrounded by millions of humans trapped the same way. The Nebuchadnezzar picks him up. It's around 2199. The machines won the war against humanity and use people as a power source. The Matrix is the simulation that keeps everyone asleep.

Neo gets martial arts uploaded straight into his brain and learns that inside the Matrix the rules can bend. The crew takes him to the Oracle, who implies he isn't the One and warns that he'll have to choose between his own life and Morpheus's. On the way out, Cypher betrays the group and the Agents capture Morpheus.

Neo goes back into the Matrix with Trinity to rescue Morpheus, and they pull it off. Smith corners Neo in the subway, and Neo fights him as an equal. In a hotel room, Smith kills him. In the real world, Trinity says the Oracle told her she'd fall in love with the One. Neo gets up, sees the Matrix as code, destroys Smith and escapes. At the end he makes a call to the machines, promises to show people a world without rules and flies off.

In Kid's Story, a short from The Animatrix, a teenager who feels out of place trades messages with Neo online. Agents chase him through his school and he jumps off the roof in an act of faith. He wakes up in the real world, where Neo and Trinity tell him he freed himself from the Matrix with no outside help. Keanu Reeves voices Neo. The kid, known as Kid, shows up again later.

Six months later, Neo and Trinity are together. An army of Sentinels is digging toward Zion and will get there in 72 hours. The Oracle reveals she's a program too and tells Neo he must reach the Source with the Keymaker's help. Smith is back as a rogue program that can copy himself onto anyone in the Matrix, and Neo takes on dozens of copies. With Morpheus and Trinity, he takes the Keymaker from the Merovingian. Neo keeps dreaming of Trinity dying and asks her to sit the mission out.

At the Source, the Architect, creator of the Matrix, explains that Neo is the sixth version of the One, a part the system plans for. The choice: reload the Matrix and save a handful of people to rebuild Zion, or go save Trinity. Neo picks Trinity, pulls the bullet out of her chest and gets her heart beating again. In the real world, he senses the Sentinels, takes them down with his mind and falls into a coma.

Neo's mind is stuck at Mobil Ave, a station between the Matrix and the machine world. There he meets a girl named Sati and her parents, all programs. Trinity, Morpheus and Seraph get him out. The Oracle explains that Smith is Neo's opposite and wants to destroy both worlds.

Neo asks for a ship to reach the Machine City, and Niobe gives him the Logos. On the way, Bane, possessed by Smith, attacks and blinds him, but Neo starts seeing the machines as light. In the Machine City, Neo offers the Deus Ex Machina a deal: he stops Smith, and in return the machines call off the attack on Zion. In the final fight, Neo lets Smith absorb him, and the energy running through him destroys every copy. The Sentinels pull back. The machines carry Neo's body away.

Sixty years later, Thomas Anderson is a game designer famous for a trilogy called The Matrix. He takes blue pills prescribed by his Analyst and keeps running into a woman named Tiffany at a coffee shop, who reminds him of the Trinity from his games. Captain Bugs and a new version of Morpheus help him wake up in the real world, in a pod right across from Trinity's.

In Io, the humans' city, an elderly Niobe tells him what has changed. The Analyst reveals he's the program that brought Neo and Trinity back and keeps them close but apart, because that generates a lot of energy. Neo makes a bet: if Trinity won't leave, he goes back to his pod. She chooses to leave. Cornered on a rooftop, it's Trinity who flies. At the end, the two warn the Analyst that they're going to remake the Matrix.

Neo is an anagram of One. The role went through a lot of people before Keanu Reeves: Will Smith turned it down for Wild Wild West and later said he would have messed it up. Nicolas Cage also said no, and Warner Bros. wanted Brad Pitt or Val Kilmer. Leonardo DiCaprio said yes at first, then backed out. Outside the films, Neo is playable in The Matrix: Path of Neo, which recreates the trilogy, and he's central to the story of the MMO The Matrix Online.