When we first meet Neo in The Matrix he’s asleep at his desk—a recurring image in Keanu’s movies—bathed in the light of his computer screen. A message bleeps. “What? What the hell?” he splutters. There’s a knock at the door: “Something wrong, man? You look a little whiter than usual.” In the original script, this character is called Choi (“a young Chinese man”) but in the actual film Choi is played by a white guy.

It’s not clear why Neo is so confused, but for most of the film he has a similar look on his face—the look of someone who hasn’t quite woken up. On meeting him, Morpheus phrases it differently. He recognizes in Neo “the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.”

This look suggests that Neo knows the world around him isn’t quite right but accepts its glitches nevertheless. Maybe he thinks they can’t continue forever. However bad the dream, it has to end. This would be typical for a Keanu hero: not in the prow; strong yet passive; aware of things being wrong but not actively looking to set them right, or waiting for the right moment to present itself. Led rather than leading, he works by intuition, not force.

Morpheus, named after the god of sleep, has come to tell him that now is the time to wake up and act. In the Wachowskis’ script, Morpheus is described as having “the unadulterated confidence of a zealot.” Rather than staying to defend his homeland, he has ventured in search of the One. Thinking he’s found him in Neo, he becomes his guide and mentor. Most of the film follows Morpheus’s attempts to teach Neo how to overcome the Matrix, as when, in kung fu films, the master takes on a raw apprentice. Here, since the kung fu can be downloaded straight into Neo’s brain, the purpose of his training isn’t so much to teach him how to fight as to get him to see the world differently.

But Neo has spent his whole life in the Matrix, a system of control so all-consuming as to have structured every aspect of his experience. To reprogram him, Morpheus has to start at the very beginning. Neo must unlearn his most basic impulses before he can reach the point of jumping from a tall building—a part of his training—without any fear of falling, without even expecting to fall. He needs to become a different person: a more fluid, mixed version of himself.