The Matrix

The Matrix, released in 1999 by Warner Bros. Pictures, was the first entry in what would become a major film and media franchise. The movie follows the story of Thomas Anderson (also known as Neo), a computer programmer and part-time hacker who finds himself entangled with a shadowy underground figure known as Morpheus. After months of late-night internet searches and a tense run-in with mysterious men in dark suits known only as Agents, Neo is finally brought before Morpheus. Neo is told that the world he knows is a lie, and that he has a choice between learning the truth and forgetting this whole episode ever happened. Neo chooses the truth, and after taking a red pill and being subjected to an odd procedure, Neo wakes up in a sarcophagus filled with amniotic good, with wires and cords protruding from his body. A massive robot drone appears and violently removes the wires and flushes him into a series of waste disposal pipes. Eventually, he's rescued by a ship, piloted by Morpheus.
On board, Neo learns that the world he knew is a lie- a virtual reality construct known as the Matrix. At some point in the past, humanity found itself on the losing side of a war with sentient machines of their own design- a war which ravaged the planet and found humanity subjugated and enslaved by the machines. Since then, the machines have imprisoned humans from birth to death in pods, wired to massive bio-electrical energy conduits that powers their machine society. To placate the enslaved humans, their brains are jacked in to a virtual environment mimicking human society in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Morpheus and his retinue represent the last vestiges of a human resistance movement- people who have managed to free themselves from the Matrix and live in the “real world.” The rest of the movie follows Neo's journey of self-discovery, as a prophecy about him is revealed- one that could change the terms of the conflict between Man and Machine.
The Matrix can almost be described as a philosophical thought experiment. Its central themes draw on epistemological thought, with several oblique references to Plato's “Allegory of the Cave,” as well as Descartes' Meditations. In particular, the epistemological reflections on how we know what we know is illustrated when Morpheus asks Neo, “What is real? How do you define real?” These ideas also dovetail with Gnostic philosophy and belief, which says (in part) that the world we live in is an illusion, a dream that followers spend their lives trying to wake up from. Christian imagery also appears, as the story features a prophecy (apparently pertaining to Neo) of a human Messiah figure who will end the ongoing war against the machines and bring freedom to humanity.
The film was released during a part of my life when I was fairly impressionable. As such, the themes and imagery in the film resonated with me. In particular, one of the themes that I really connected with was the question of Self and Identity, and how mutable it really is. I also spent a lot of time after I saw the film thinking about the nature of freedom- how much of it was “real” and how much was an illusion we construct. I was also struck by the blending of technology and spirituality- in fact, that's when I first started exploring the space where the two overlap through my writing, art, and other work. The idea of living things as initialized code, of the world as a computer program, of our senses as a user interface... this was all pretty deep stuff when I was 17.