At an abandoned hotel in a major city, a police squad corners Trinity, who overpowers them with superhuman abilities. She flees, pursued by the police and a group of suited Agents capable of similar superhuman feats. She answers a ringing public telephone and vanishes.
Computer programmer Thomas Anderson, known by his hacking alias “Neo,” is puzzled by repeated online encounters with the phrase “the Matrix.” Trinity contacts him and tells him a man named Morpheus has the answers he seeks. A team of Agents and police, led by Agent Smith, arrives at Neo’s workplace in search of him.
Though Morpheus attempts to guide Neo to safety, Neo surrenders rather than risk a dangerous escape. The Agents attempt to coerce Neo into helping them locate Morpheus, who they claim is a terrorist. When Neo refuses, the agents fuse his mouth shut and implant a robotic “bug” in his stomach. Neo wakes up from what he believes to be a nightmare. Soon after, Neo is taken by Trinity to meet Morpheus, and she removes the bug from Neo, proving that the “nightmare” he experienced was real.
Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two pills: red to reveal the truth about the Matrix, and blue to forget everything and return to his former life. As Neo takes the red pill, his reality begins to distort, and he soon awakens in a liquid-filled pod among countless others, containing other humans. He is then brought aboard Morpheus’ flying ship, the Nebuchadnezzar.
As Neo recuperates from a lifetime of physical inactivity in the pod, Morpheus explains the situation: In the early 21st century, a war broke out between humanity and intelligent machines. After humans blocked the machines’ access to solar energy, the machines responded by capturing humans and harvesting their bioelectric power while keeping their minds pacified in the Matrix, a shared simulated reality modeled after the world as it was in 1999.
