The Wachowski Siblings In The Film The Matrix

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The Wachowski Siblings skillfully interwove ancient philosophical concepts into their 1999 film The Matrix. These concepts question how people perceive and question the nature of reality. The core idea of the movie is adapted from the ancient philosophy of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. However as the audience of the film is from the 20th century the ideas must be adapted to suit a modern audience to be more relatable and easily interpreted. Along with this the directors indirectly pose us, the audience a question. If we were in Neo’s shoes, would we continue to live in a comfortable, false reality in which we are blissfully unaware of the true goings on? Or would we chose to live in a harsh, ‘true reality’ in the search of knowledge and enlightenment?…show more content…
Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher who questioned whether what people accepted as reality was in fact real. Plato investigated the concept that the world in which we have always known is nothing more than an illusion. Plato imagined a cave where people have remain confined in since their birth. These people are bound so that they cannot move or turn to see what is behind them, so their only view their entire lives has been directly in front of them. On the cave wall in front of them are shadows of things happening behind them. The shadows on the wall are the only thing that the prisoners have ever seen, therefore they believe that these shadows constitute the real world. One day a prisoner breaks free of his bonds and sees the real world for the first time in his life. Behind the bound prisoners are statues and a fire which were used to make the shadows. After he has escaped the prisoner exits the cave and sees the real world for the first time. He then returns to the cave to share his discovery with the other prisoners. In the film The Matrix the humans are very much like the prisoners in the cave. The entire human race has been
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