Agent Smith: the Program That Stopped Following Orders

Agent Smith begins as a suit with a dry voice and ends up as the biggest threat in the story. Hugo Weaving's performance made him one of the great film villains, and the sequels gave him something few enforcers get. He gets free, he hates it, and he blames Neo. (The Matrix)

The Agent#

Agents are the Matrix's security. They can possess anyone still plugged in, which makes every person in a crowd a potential enemy. Smith leads the hunt for Morpheus, and in the first film's most revealing scene he sends the other Agents out and tells his prisoner what he really thinks. Human beings, he says, are a disease, a cancer of this planet. He hates the smell and the job, and wants out. (The Matrix)

He then kills Neo in a corridor, which turns out to be the worst thing he could have done. Neo comes back, dives into him and blows him apart from the inside. (The Matrix)

The virus#

In Reloaded he's back. When Neo destroyed him, something copied across, and he no longer answers to the system. He has his earpiece delivered to Neo, and later tells him so. He can now overwrite anyone he touches, and a single Smith quickly becomes a crowd, which is how we get the burly brawl of a hundred Smiths. Worse, he copies himself onto Bane, a crew member, and that gets him out of the Matrix into a human body. (The Matrix Reloaded)

Bane sabotages Zion's defences and later attacks Neo on the way to the Machine City, blinding him before he's killed. (The Matrix Revolutions)

The last fight#

By Revolutions Smith has taken nearly the whole Matrix, including the Oracle, and he has her sight. The Machines can't contain him. He and Neo fight in the rain and it's a fight neither can win, until Neo stops resisting and lets himself be overwritten. It's a trap. Because Neo is connected to the Machines, they reach through him, and every Smith is destroyed at once. (The Matrix Revolutions)

Resurrections#

He's back in the fourth film, played by Jonathan Groff as Anderson's business partner, in a role he doesn't at first remember. Once he does, he makes it clear that he doesn't want to be under anyone's control any more, and that puts him briefly on Neo's side against the Analyst. (The Matrix Resurrections)