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Morpheus is the name of a fictional character (played by Laurence Fishburne) in the science fiction films, The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions.
The Dreamer of Dreams
Morpheus was the captain of the Nebuchadnezzar, a hovercraft of the human forces of the last human city, Zion, in a devastated world where most humans are grown by sentient Machines and kept imprisoned in the Matrix, a virtual computer-generated world. Morpheus was once a human living inside the Matrix until he was freed earlier in life. The name he may have had while a human in the Matrix is not known.
Morpheus is apparently a very popular public figure in the city of Zion. He is also known in the Matrix, but as a dangerous terrorist wanted by Agents (who are actually sentient programs that patrol the Matrix, eliminating any human that is a threat to the secret of the Matrix or dispatching programs that exile themselves in the Matrix to avoid their deletion).
Like other hovercraft crews, Morpheus and his crew are dedicated to the protection of Zion and the freeing of humans from the Matrix.
Finding The One
Earlier in his life, Morpheus gained the romantic attention of Niobe, another hovercraft captain. That relationship became estranged shortly after Morpheus visited The Oracle, an ally living in the Matrix who appeared as an old black woman. The Oracle could foretell the future, and she told Morpheus that he would be the person who would find The One, a human with superhuman abilities within the Matrix and who could end the Man/Machine War. Since that visit, Morpheus spent much of his life searching the Matrix for The One.
In the first feature film, The Matrix, Morpheus successfully found and monitored a pod-human named Thomas A. Anderson, a computer hacker who called himself Neo. Despite a close call with Agents that captured, interrogated, and placed a surveillance device on Neo, Morpheus and his crew located Neo. Morpheus offered Neo a choice of ingesting a red pill, which would activate a trace program to help Neo discover the truth of the Matrix, or a blue pill, which would leave Neo in the Matrix to live and believe what he wanted to believe. The Nebuchadnezzar crew were able to eject Neo's body from the Matrix powerplant and retrieve him from the cold sewers where hovercrafts patrol. Morpheus took a risk in helping Neo escape the Matrix, as human minds that live too long in the Matrix may have trouble in comprehending the real world and the truth of the Matrix. Initially, Neo did experience serious denial when Morpheus explained the truth, a point for which Morpheus apologized.
The Prophecy begins
Shortly after Neo first visited the Oracle, Morpheus was captured and interrogated by Agents after a crew member, Cypher, betrayed the crew, killing several members before being stopped. Since Morpheus, as a hovercraft captain, possessed access codes to the Zion mainframe computer, the surviving members of the ship's crew were about to unplug Morpheus from the Matrix without the ability to retrieve his mind or his body, a process that would kill him. However, Neo had his own foretelling from the Oracle that told him that either Morpheus or Neo would die, but that he had the choice to save himself or Morpheus. Neo and Trinity reentered the Matrix and made a daring but successful rescue of Morpheus. Neo saved Trinity from a helicopter crash, confirming Morpheus' belief that Neo was indeed The One of legend.
Neo was eventually killed by Agent Smith shortly after the rescue, but reawakened as The One and returned to the Nebuchadnezzar before Sentinels could destroy the ship.
The Dream is gone from him
In the second film, The Matrix Reloaded, the viewer sees Morpheus more confident than ever that the war is nearing its end. A spiritual as well as an influential leader, Morpheus convinces one hovercraft ship to stay in the Matrix to await contact from the Oracle, despite orders from Zion for all ships to return to the city. He incurs the wrath of Jason Lock, commander of the Zion defensive forces, but Morpheus' actions are easily defended by Councillor Hamann, a member of the Zion Council, the city's ruling body.
With the aid of Trinity and Niobe, Morpheus successfully retrieves The Keymaker, an exiled program that can access many hidden areas of the Matrix, including the Source, the central Machine City mainframe computer and programming heart of the Matrix. Morpheus aids Neo in successfully entering the door to the Source before returning to the Nebuchadnezzar.
After Neo successfully enters the Source and returns from the Matrix with new information, he tells Morpheus that the Prophecy was a lie; it was another system of control that would bring The One to the Source to disseminate the programming inside Neo into the Matrix to allow a reboot, or reload of the Matrix, while Zion is destroyed and allowed to be rebuilt. The war was far from over. To make matters worse, a sudden Sentinel attack destroys the Nebuchadnezzar, further damaging Morpheus' belief in the outcome of the war. The crew is rescued by the hovercraft the Hammer, and joins forces with the Logos, commanded by Niobe.
Morpheus repurposes himself
In the final film The Matrix Revolutions, the viewer sees a somewhat disspirited Morpheus, who has problems in understanding now what may truly happen to Zion and its people. Now without a ship of his own, he and Link (the Nebuchadnezzar's Operator) reside on the hovercraft Hammer, commanded by Roland. Morpheus renews his conviction that Neo could still save Zion by reawakening him, whose mind was trapped in a computer netherworld called Mobil Avenue after Neo stopped five Sentinels in the real world just by thought at the end of The Matrix Reloaded. With the aid of Trinity and Seraph, he rescues Neo and returns his mind to the real world.
Morpheus says farewell to Neo and Trinity a final time before they leave for the Machine City in the hovercraft Logos in a last-ditch attempt to stop the war. Morpheus aids Niobe as she flies the Hammer in a desperate ride back to Zion. The ship successfully stops the first onslaught of the Machine attack with the ship's electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon.
When the Sentinels suddenly stop a second wave of attacks, Morpheus instantly realizes that Neo is fighting for them, somehow. When the Sentinels retreat after Neo successfully defeats the former Agent Smith, now a virus that threatened both man and Machine, Morpheus, and Niobe embrace in celebration as cheers arise from the Zion population, who have received a brokered peace through Neo's sacrifice. Morpheus' dream turned out to be right after all.
Of the original Nebuchadnezzar crew the viewer sees in The Matrix, only Morpheus survives to see freedom for Zion.
An additional irony, referring back to the subjectivity of reality throughout the film trilogy, are from Morpheus' last lines in The Matrix Revolutions, said in disbelief as the Sentinels retreat from Zion: "Is this real?"
The end of a dream
In The Matrix Online, Morpheus (operated by the game management staff as a non-player character) grew impatient with the Machines. He demanded that the Machines return the body of Neo. After many failed attempts, Morpheus began causing terrorist attacks throughout the Matrix. These attacks took the form of code bombs: weapons that destroyed Matrix code, infecting redpills and causing shock and death to bluepills. By killing Morpheus's guards, redpills in the Matrix were able to find means of disabling Morpheus's bombs. Now with few allies in Zion or anywhere, Morpheus' erratic, nightmarish zealotry become closer to that of the false terrorist accusations made of him by the Agents before the Truce, during the war.
During the game events on May 26, 2005 (as recorded on the game's official website), Morpheus planted a code bomb in a water treatment facility (it has been repeatedly been stated that this specific location is somehow important on a deeper level). After planting the bomb, he realized he was being hunted by an enigmatic, masked figure known as the Assassin. Morpheus was barely able to escape the treatment facility; however, upon escaping, the Assassin bent the code of the Matrix and emerged from a vent in the wall. Morpheus was caught off-guard and was unable to dodge the Assassin's bullets. He died from gunshot wounds.
As with Neo and Trinity, Morpheus' remains in the real world have yet to be found.
Some players argue against the death of the character Morpheus as the Matrix now provides an "Emergency Jack-Out" upgrade for redpills, eliminating the permanent death that previous redpills experienced if killed within the Matrix before the Truce. This feature could save a redpill's life with no fatal injuries. Some redpills reasoned that the Assassin's bullets contained code that disabled this feature, a theory which proved to be true as the Assassin was hunted down by the factions of Zion, the Machines, and the Merovingian, an epic battle which resulted in many deaths, including the Assassin himself. Also, prior to Morpheus's assassination, a few select redpills were given an email by Morpheus that he would fake his death and lay low.
However, in the aftermath, it was discovered that the Assassin's gun and bullets, which contain the permanent kill-codes, were missing from the corpse. Someone in the Matrix has their hands on some very deviant power...
Trivia
- In the early drafts of The Matrix screenplay, one revelation during the story was that before meeting Neo, Morpheus had believed five other people to be The One, all of whom had died at the hands of Agents after being freed. This aspect of Morpheus' history was dropped, although the notion of five Ones before Neo was reused in The Matrix Reloaded.
- The name "Morpheus" refers to the ancient Greek god of dreams, see Morpheus.
- Lawrence Fishburne's physical build can be argued as a continuity break in The Matrix Trilogy. Morpheus's large frame is indicative of the strong, well-fed, natural-born inhabitants of Zion. A typical redpill is anemic or emaciated due to being unnaturally grown by the machines and muscle atrophy while in the Matrix. It can also be argued that Morpheus has had adequate time acquire his good health.
- The Wachowski brothers, writers and directors of The Matrix films, were fans of Neil Gaiman and based the character of Morpheus on the title character from the comic book The Sandman, also adopting one of his most common pseudonyms, Morpheus. They gave Fishburne some or all of the series to read, and the style of speech and mannerism of the Matrix character are heavily informed by the Sandman character, although since The Sandman is only a graphic novel, much of the tone and inflection is an original (though recognizable) interpretative creation on Fishburne's part. This connection is hinted at again in Enter the Matrix when Niobe calls the Daniel Institute of Dream Interpretation to get in touch with Morpheus.
"Morpheus (The Matrix)"