Morpheus is Captain of the Nebuchadnezzar and a Master Rebel. Master Rebels are the most skilled fighters of all redpill humans who hack the Matrix, even capable of putting up a decent fight against Arch-Agents, which is exactly what Morpheus does twice: first against Arch-Agent Smith in M1 when he sacrifices himself for Neo, and then against Arch-Agent Johnson in order to protect the Keymaker on the moving truck.
The skills that allow Master Rebels to bend and break rules within the Matrix cannot be passed on to other people via downloading into the brain, so they can only be passed on via sparring programs. Niobe is also a Master Rebel.
The machines already have the capability to obliterate Zion, so it seems strange at first that the Agents (and therefore machines) want Morpheus to give them access codes to Zion’s mainframe. However, Zion’s only entrance is a gate that would be impossibly difficult for machines to penetrate, especially with the extremely powerful automated weapons outside the gate that are on guard all the time. The machines plan to dig into their city from above to avoid this well-guarded entrance, therefore minimizing losses on the machine side. With access codes to the mainframe, the machines could slaughter the humans with very minimal loss. Access codes to the mainframe could potentially allow the machines to disable the humans’ defenses outside the main gate, open the main gate, disable the monitoring systems that the commanders use to analyze the enemy, disrupt communications, etc.
The Dreamer
Morpheus is also the name of the Greek god of dreams. Aside from the most obvious reference to this, coming from the fact that Morpheus believes in the dream (prophecy) of the Oracle more than any other human rebel, we see many other references to this all throughout the movies:
Morpheus: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would
you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? (M1)
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Morpheus: You've been living in a dream world, Neo. (M1)
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Morpheus: What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to
change a human being into this. (M1)
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Morpheus: Good night, Zion. Sweet Dreams. (M2) [We hear "dreamy" chimes while Morpheus looks up at a sleeping Zion, which resembles a
night scene of stars in the sky. This image is shown above.]
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Morpheus: I have dreamed a dream, and now that dream has gone from me. (M2, after Nebuchadnezzar explodes)
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Morpheus: I have imagined this moment for so long. Is this real? (M3, after Sentinels leave Zion Temple entrance)
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Lawrence Fishburne (in The Matrix Revisited) makes the observation that Morpheus shows his masculine side inside of the Matrix (I would extend this to his dealings with Commander Lock as well as his speech to Zion), while he shows his feminine side inside of the Nebuchadnezzar. He compares this feminine role to a mother in her den.
During The Matrix Online, Morpheus is killed by The Assassin, but the MxO plotline was not treated as canon by the Wachowskis. In The Matrix Resurrections, we learn that Morpheus was elected head of the council of Zion. He and everyone else in Zion was either killed or forced to plug back into the Matrix with different DSIs shortly after the Analyst's Matrix 8.0 was implemented.
Interestingly, Morpheus seems to take on a "trinity" of forms (modal, Matrix and exomorphic), and while Trinity gets Neo out of the Matrix in M1, Morpheus gets Neo out in M4.
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 Analyst: Fail-Safe |
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