Character
Near the climax of The Matrix Reloaded, Neo meets the Architect face to face in a large oval-shaped room with two doors, whose walls are covered with television monitors. (A close-up of these monitors is briefly seen early in The Matrix, but is not identified as such at the time.) Taking the form of a cold, humorless, white-haired man in a light gray suit, he is a computer program that created the Matrix and now oversees its functioning. His artificial nature is more readily apparent than that of other programs personified as humans. The Architect is extremely mechanical in his actions, in that he speaks in long logical chains of reasoning, utilizing several connectors (discourse markers) such as "ergo", "concordantly", and "thus", and has little variance in his tone of voice. He also has little facial expression beyond smirks and glares, but does exhibit emotion on limited occasions, such as regret, annoyance and arrogance.
The Architect's first attempt at a Matrix was a utopia, but it failed miserably and many human lives were lost when the inhabitants refused to accept it. The Architect then redesigned the Matrix to reflect the darker side of human nature and history, but the dystopian version failed too. The solution to this problem was discovered by the Oracle: a version of the Matrix that gave humans the unconscious choice of accepting it. This version was accepted by nearly 100% of all test subjects, so that the Matrix was rewritten to allow subjects to choose subconsciously whether they wanted to be a part of it. Less than 1% of humans that did not accept the Matrix would inevitably increase and become a threat to it. Despite this problem, this threat was expected and consequently could be controlled to some extent.
In The Matrix Revolutions, the Oracle explains to Neo that the true purpose of the Architect is to balance the mathematical equations that make up the programming of the Matrix, and he is unable to see the world as anything beyond a series of equations. It is also because of this that he is unable to comprehend choice and free will and cannot see the results of such choices as they are no more than variable factors in an equation to him.
Read more about this topic: Architect (The Matrix)
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