Comparing Matrix And Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

Imagine several prisoners who have been chained up in a cave for all of their lives. They have never been outside the cave. They face a wall in the cave and they can never look at the entrance of the cave. Sometimes animals, birds, people, or other objects pass by the entrance of the cave casting a shadow on the wall inside the cave. The prisoners see the shadows on the wall and mistakenly view the shadows as reality. However, one man breaks free from his chains and runs out of the cave. For the first time, he sees the real world and now knows that it is far beyond the shadows he had been seeing. He sees real birds and animals, not just shadows of birds and animals. This man is excited about what he sees and he goes back to his fellow prisoners in the cave to tell them about the real world. But to his astonishment, they don’t believe him. In fact, they are angry with him.
In the Matrix, the main character, Neo, is trapped in a false reality created by a computer program.
The program was created by machines that took over the planet. While in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a prisoner is able to comprehend the reality of the cave and the real one outside the cave.

The very few differences between these two works include the fact that the Matrix has no forms while the Allegory of the Cave does. Also, unlike Plato’s prisoner, who manages to find his way out of the cave without any help from others, Neo is helped out by Morpheus.

The movie "The Matrix" is a giant reference to Plato's myth, with the Matrix as the cave, and Neo being an escapee. Neo's first words outside of the Matrix are "My eyes
hurt."