Heroic movie characters stand up for what they feel is right, and they stick to those beliefs in situations that would leave most of us forsaking every oath we've ever sworn and tossing our loved ones to the ground as obstacles while we flee to safety. However, in some cases the hero spends the entire film spouting ideological rhetoric only to cash it in like a two-dollar scratch ticket the moment it gets in the way of accomplishing his or her goals.

6 Morpheus in The Matrix Fights Against Slavery, Has an Army of Child Soldiers

Warner Bros.

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What He's All About:

The Matrix teaches us the powerful lesson that being enslaved by robots would suck the eternal ball sack of gangrenous horror. So right now, as a unified people, let's agree to not let that happen.

Anyway, in the films, Morpheus leads a small resistance force comprised of men and women who have been freed from the machines' enslavement program to rise up and fight for their right to lead lives of freedom, choice, and non-liquefaction into robot-feeding jelly. Everyone deserves to be in control of their own fate, and no living thing should be subjected to the whims of a powerful overlord.

Warner Bros.

"Although it is important that we all match."

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Except ...

The entire resistance in The Matrix is made up of brainwashed child soldiers.

Think about it -- when Neo is recovering from getting his brain unplugged from the robots' Dream Machine, Morpheus explains to him that he and his fellow rebels "never free a mind once it's reached a certain age. It's dangerous. The mind has trouble letting go." Zion evidently doesn't subscribe to the teachings of En Vogue.

Basically, Morpheus is saying that adults tend to have trouble letting go of the Matrix (this becomes a major plot point when a member of their team betrays them for the opportunity to get plugged back in). So they recruit kids, because kids are more impressionable, more willing to take up an idealistic cause, and more pliable -- they can be handed weapons and told to kill something without asking too many questions. They are then tossed into a world of violence and strife and told that their lives can have only one path (death to all robots). Which is slavery. Which is the thing Morpheus is supposed to be fighting against.

Warner Bros.

"Your name is Router. What's your name?"

"... Phil."

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If what Morpheus tells Neo is true, he had to have built his entire army out of juveniles, which is an implication that the movie never directly addresses. The closest we get is Mouse, who looks like he's about 14 and is horribly shot to death about 80 minutes into the movie.