It seems as though Neo is surrounded by the darkness of uncertainty and every single clue is like a spectrum of light, shed to illuminate his way to the center of the maze. The beginning scenes in the movie seem dark, somber and very ambiguous. Even the audience is presented to this darkness from the first moment of the movie, where there is absolute darkness. The bright light right after the title indicates the introduction to the incredible speed and strength that can only be reached in a surreal world, the Matrix - the first clue to the puzzle. This bright light serves as a foreshadowing to the future scenes. This is one of many cinematography techniques used in the movie, when Neo is introduced to the Matrix for the first time and he is surrounded by white blank space. This is when Morpheus gives Neo a glimpse of reality. The outside world is scorched by constant wars; the sky is covered with a dark curtain of clouds with no sun in sight. There is not one living thing to be seen for thousand and thousands of miles, all there seems to be is just miles and miles of lifeless desert with a few survivors down deep under the ground near the core of the earth. Morpheus shows Neo the true history of mankind and the twist of fate that the progress in creating the artificial intelligence has brought upon human race. People are no longer in charge of computers, but vice versa. It is here that Neo is introduced to this light of knowledge, which is hard for him to accept and puts him in denial.
The idea of light indicating knowledge can be related to Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Plato gives us as an example people living in the cave knowing nothing but the walls of the cave, "Here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads." (Plato 277). When one of them is exposed to "light" of knowledge and tries to share his experience of the outside world, others ignore him.