The Matrix / Tropes H to M

The Matrix Trope Examples
A - G | H - M | N - Z

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H

• Hacker Cave: The operator stations in the hovercraft function as mobile Hacker Caves.
• Hammerspace: Trinity can pull out weapons and her cell phone while wearing skintight costumes.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: You can become an expert in just about anything in seconds by having the skill uploaded into your brain. Although it's implied that the process is normally physically and/or mentally taxing on the individual, judging from Tank's incredulous comments about how long Neo has been downloading. In Path of Neo, we find out that its actually a matter of time dilation. Seconds passing in the real world for hours passing in intense training.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: The wardrobe of the main cast, as you can see in the picture.
• The Hero's Journey: The machines treat this as an inevitable process as long as they create the right setup and don't try too hard to stop the One. They allow the Redpills a chance to escape unharmed and don't let the agents become powerful enough to kill the One. They attatch all of the anomalies caused by human choice to one person and hope that his Character Development will drive him to save humanity by continuing the status quo.
• Hero Killer: The Agents and sentinels.
• Hive Mind: The Agents seem to operate this way.
• Homage: The directors pitched the idea to Joel Silver by showing him the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie and saying "we want to do a live-action version." The style, themes, and action of the Matrix trilogy owe a lot to that movie.
• Human Resources: As discussed in the main text, the machines partly power their civilisation on the "bio-electricity" drawn from the bodies of human beings ensnared in the Matrix. The "[kind of] fusion" Morpheus says this is combined with is never revealed.
• Humans Are Bastards:
  • Agent Smith's speech to Morpheus in the first movie where he considers humanity more like a disease than a species.
  • It was humans who scorched the sky.
  • Apparently, the Machines were all too willing to coexist, being simple, even innocent beings at first. But the humans wouldn't hear any of it, even tearing apart the two robots sent to the UN to negotiate. On the spot!
    • Given that the level of symbolism in The Second Renaissance makes the movies look straightforward by comparison, it's hard to tell if anything in it should be taken at face value, or if it's all meant as a representation of how things went down.
  • If the Architect is to be trusted, humans are apparently hardwired to be unable to comprehend a true utopia.
• Humans Are Smelly: Agent Smith often remarks on just how bad humans smell to him.
• Humans Are White: A notable aversion, especially once Zion enters the picture. Even beforehand, the real world humans of the first are led by Morpheus, who is black. The series also subverts The Smurfette Principle with the main leads of the first (as the crew has two females - Switch and Trinity), so good on the Wachowskis. Indeed, Neo himself was originally hoped to be played by Will Smith; obviously it didn't pan out that way, but his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith did join the cast in the sequels.

I

• Implacable Man: Just about all the Agents, but Smith in particular.
• Impossibly Cool Clothes: Apparently, one's "residual self-image" includes cool hair and an awesome outfit. No exceptions. Even the nerdy Mouse is pretty snazzy inside. Going by The Matrix Online, where the character-creation was your redpill selecting what their in-Matrix appearance would be, apparently that's just how they like it. You could look boring and normal...but then you'd never get any screen time.
• Industrialized Evil: The Machine's source of power: turn humans into batteries.
• Info Drop: The protagonist is generally called either Neo or Mr. Anderson. His first name, Thomas, is mentioned only twice; during his interrogation by Agent Smith near the beginning of the film, and when he is delivered the cell phone through which Morpheus contacts him for the first time.
• Inside a Computer System: The main premise of the films.
• Instant Expert: Justified. All humans spend most of their lives plugged into a computer network through which they receive simulated experiences anyway — their Unusual User Interfaces can also act as Upgrade Artifacts, making it a trivial matter to have a full training regimen for anything from martial arts to piloting written directly into your brain in a matter of seconds. Whether this carries over to the real world is up in the air, though the series' only real-world fight scene is considerably less flashy than all of the other action scenes.
• Insult Backfire:
  Oracle: You are a bastard, you know that?
  Agent Smith: You would know, Mom.
• In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: Hinted at; while the humans in the Matrix itself are shown to be more or less split along the traditional ethnic lines, the humans in Zion are frequently of mixed race. Makes sense; people in the Matrix would have a much larger pool of same-race partners than the few freed humans in Zion would.
• Invincible Hero: One of the common complaints about Reloaded and Revolutions. Ironic, considering how it all ends. It's played with, most notably in the chateau where we see that Neo isn't invincible when he tries to block a blade with his hand and the Merovingian actually blows the later reveal that he's not the first One right there, twice. The scene progresses so rapidly while giving these points no special lipservice that many viewers completely miss it, or catch it but forget it five minutes later.
  • Alternately, they might have mistaken his saying "I have survived your predecessors" as meaning Ghost and Niobe from the video game; which also makes sense, going a ways towards preserving The Reveal. ...Provided the person watching had played the video game first, of course.
• Irony: How Agent Smith in the first movie equates the human race to being a virus that must be eradicated, yet in the following movies becomes a self-replicating virus.
• It's A Small Net After All
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: Neo should've been more careful for what he wished to know about the Matrix. He gets his computer hacked and is chased about and violated by Agents. Shortly being forcefully and painfully ejected from the Matrix, he learns the truth about the Matrix and completely loses it for a bit. He gets a little fun when learning how to bend the rules of virtual reality, but when Agent Smith and others put them to the ultimate test, he's bludgeoned silly before being shot. Even after getting Enlightenment Superpowers, he realizes they have a limit. He can hardly get a moment's peace with his girlfriend because of all the hero worship he gets. His purpose eludes him until he realizes that Smith, a fatalistic abomination, must kill him to save everyone in and out of the Matrix. He learned, literally, that you You Can't Fight Fate, but you can trick it.

K

• Kill All Humans: Just about; of course, it's brinksmanship as we find out they need each other.
• Knuckle Cracking: Agent Smith does this with his knuckles and neck in the original film and his neck in Reloaded.
• Kung-Fu Jesus: Might as well be the trilogy's alternate title.

L

• La Résistance: The resistance movement against the Matrix, naturally. Double subverted at the end of Reloaded, where the Architect reveals that the resistance's existence is actually vital to the continuation of the Matrix, which is why the machines loyal to the Matrix don't (immediately) wipe them out. Unless human beings are given the choice to accept or reject the reality of the Matrix, even if they are only aware of this choice subconsciously, the entire system collapses ("entire crops [are] lost", in Smith's words). The tiny number of humans who do reject the system are allowed to become rebels, live in Zion and extract others "redpills" from the Matrix. When their numbers grow large enough, they are wiped out, while the One selects a small number of rebellious humans from the Matrix to repopulate Zion and start the process over again. The double subversion comes when Neo rejects the Architect's plan at the end.
• Large Ham: Smith, at points, and particularly towards the end of the trilogy.
  This is my world, my world!
• Laser Cutter: Utilized by the Sentinels in the real world to open up the hovercrafts so they can get to the crew.
• Lethally Expensive: The hovercraft Osiris and her crew were destroyed in relaying news of the impending Machine invasion (shown in The Animatrix short film series). Niobe delivers the news to fellow captains at the start of The Matrix Reloaded.
• Liberty Over Prosperity: Everyone who lives outside of the Matrix has basically chosen freedom over comfort (or their ancestors did).
• Lightning Gun: A device the humans of Zion use on the Sentinels (and, in the first movie, each other).
• Living Battery: People act as these to power the machines.
• Long Game: The entire series can be described as a very long conflict between the Oracle and the Architect if you break things down enough. The Architect's first line to the Oracle near the end of Revolutions essentially drops the trope name.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The first iteration of the Matrix was too perfect, according to the Architect, which is why humans initially rejected it.

M

• Magical Negro: The Wachowskis seem to love this trope. They have a total of three, Morpheus included.
• Magic from Technology: The "machine world" that Neo can see into in Real Life appears as swirly, fractal images out of a Bodhisattva painting.
• Made of Iron: Every main character, and an explicit ability of the Agents.
• Malignant Plot Tumor: Agent Smith again.
• Masquerade Enforcer: The Matrix is a massive simulation maintained by Machines to entrap human minds. Anyone that is a threat to the Matrix will bring the Agents, nigh-unbeatable programs that will neutralize that threat with extreme prejudice.
• Matrix Raining Code: The display of the Matrix code on the monitors was designed to evoke trickling water or rain.
• Meaningful Name: This movie may have singlehandedly popularized the "give every character a name that foreshadows what they do" trend in recent fiction. Essays have been written. Long ones at that.
  • Morpheus, named after the Greek god of dreams. Somewhat ironic considering Morpheus' role here is to awaken people from their dream states to reality.
  • The Merovingians were a dynasty of Frankish kings before Charlemagne who were thought to be descended from Trojans.
  • Neo (νέος) means "New" in Greek. It's also a Significant Anagram of "One", as in, "The One".
  • "Anderson", Neo's real last name, is hobbled together from Άνδρος (transliterated as Andros), meaning (the) man, with the suffix "Son" which, in English, normally means "Son of". This essentially renders "Anderson" to mean "Son of Man", a title used by Jesus to refer to himself. Taken a step further, "Neo Anderson" effectively means "(the) New Son of Man", the "(the) New Jesus".
  • Neo's real first name, "Thomas," is an allusion to the Apostle Thomas, or "Doubting Thomas," who would not believe that Christ had resurrected until he could see and touch Jesus and his wounds himself. In the first movie, Neo touches his own bullet wounds before he (first) dies, in a self-referencing conclusion.
  • The entire crew of the Nebuchadnezzar has meaningful names: Cypher, an enigma; Tank and Dozer, have good physical strength; Mouse, for his size and occasional meekness. Trinity has Biblical implications. Cypher's name even gets a second meaning - "Lu-Cypher" (Lucifer), a fallen angel.
  • The name of Morpheus' ship, the Nebuchadnezzar, is a Biblical reference to King Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon, from the biblical Book of Daniel. King Nebuchadnezzar ('the Great') was famous for his conquests of Israel in Biblical times (specifically Judah and Jerusalem). He also built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (one of the lost Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) for his wife. He has a dream he can't remember but keeps searching for an answer, in Daniel 2:1-49.
• Mêlée à Trois: The last two movies were simply an all-out war between the Humans, who were fighting for survival as well for liberation from the Matrix; the Machines, who tries to destroy the Human race before they become too many to handle; and Smith, who had created his own clone army and wants to conquer both the Matrix and the real world. And there are various groups of programs exiled from the Machine world that appear as supernatural creatures within the Matrix.
• The Men in Black: The Agents.
• Messianic Archetype: Neo aka the One is the sixth and hopefully, last, although it is implied he will return as a seventh.
• Me's a Crowd: Smith's power in the sequels — he can overwrite the code of anyone in the Matrix and create a duplicate of himself.
• Metaphorically True: A specialty of the Oracle—she's not so much about actual prophecy as telling people "exactly what [they] needed to hear."
• Mind Rape:
  • Bane, who has his entire brain overwritten by Smith.
  • Matrix inhabitants that witness glitches can have their minds reformatted. Smith offers this to Neo in the interrogation room, Cypher actively seeks this, and several stories in The Animatrix deal with this concept.
• Mind Prison: The Matrix itself is a massive virtual reality prison built by robots in the future designed to keep the human population complacent and asleep so their physical bodies can be harvested for bio-energy. Morpheus even describes it in such terms. Interestingly, earlier iterations actually experimented with this before settling on a rendition of late 20th century Earth; people's minds didn't accept either the Gilded Cage or Crapsack World versions.
  Morpheus: [The truth is] that you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.
• Mind Screw: Many.
  • Most memorably, the ending of the second movie.
  • The manner in which characters jack into the Matrix is a symbolic mind screw: they stick a giant needle in their brain. Freud is laughing.
  • The Oracle even lampshades the trope in her talk with Neo in the first movie after the vase breaking bit.
    Neo: How did you —
    Oracle: Ohhhh, what's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?
• Mission Control: The Operators act as mission control, providing vital information and assistance from afar. They are uniquely suited to the role in that their greater perspective of the frontline hero's actions is both concrete and metaphysical.
• MMORPG:
  • The Matrix is this up to eleven.
  • And of course there was the Matrix Online MMO, which is (meant to be) a Canon continuation of this universe.
• The Mole:
  • Cypher in the first movie (via Deal with the Devil)
  • Bane in the sequels (via Demonic Possession)
• Mood Lighting
• Mortal Wound Reveal: After the Logos crashes in the machine city, Neo talks to Trinity for a bit, then the camera pans down to reveal that Trinity's been impaled by wreckage.
• Motherly Scientist: Considering that Neo is a guinea pig, the Motherly Scientist role is occupied by the Oracle, who not only gives Neo advice, she also bakes cookies for him.
• Mr. Smith: All the Agents have bland pseudonyms. And there is an Agent Smith, which is better. The other Agents in the first are Agent Brown and Agent Jones. In the second, there is Agent Jackson and Agent Thompson.
• Myself, My Avatar: How you enter the Matrix.

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