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Skipping between two worlds - the one that we recognize of skyscrapers and dull, mundane office jobs, where we aren't destined to ever achieve anything of greatness; and then the one outside The Matrix, bleak and empty, and made up of survivors who managed to escape that world. One way or another, humans are ruled over by "The Agents" here, a race of super-powered machines that can practically do and be anything within The Matrix simulation, and who dominate any kind of break against conformity with ice-cold violence.
For a series that defined a decade, its wildly diminishing returns have done nothing to water down its original movie's coolness. As an allegory on humanity and technology, rebirth, and an ahead-of-its-time look at the transgender experience (both directors have transitioned since the creation of the first film), The Matrix and its sequels ask incredibly thought-provoking questions alongside wacky gun-fu and enough machine gun fire to make any teenage boy salivate.
In the early to mid-2000s, Matrix fandom was all-encompassing. The films themselves were brave and adventurous, their scopes gigantic, and their world building awe-inspiring. Leather jackets and "bullet time" was where it was at, and the first film would become a seminal piece of action/sci-fi filmmaking that would push the boundaries of technology both in our conversations and on our film sets.
With the fourth installment dropping at the end of 2021, and arriving to extraordinarily mixed and divisive reviews, here we take you through The Matrix franchise and their chronological order, which is ostensibly the same as their order of release, apart from a good portion of The Animatrix.
The Matrix Movies in Chronological Order
- The Animatrix: Second Renaissance
- The Animatrix: A Detective Story
- The Matrix
- The Animatrix: A Kid's Story
- The Animatrix: Final Flight of the Osiris
- The Matrix Reloaded
- The Matrix Revolutions
- The Animatrix: Beyond
- The Matrix Resurrections
- The Animatrix: Program
- The Animatrix: World Record
- The Animatrix: Matriculated
Go Down to In Order of Release Date
The Animatrix
As a collective of nine separate shorts, adding even more depth to The Matrix universe, The Animatrix is a broad and audacious take on the universe that presents its world through the guise of animation (a medium that seems so obvious and intrinsic to the otherworldly kicks and flips of that world already). The film was released between the second and third installments of The Matrix as a way to flesh out the world, and each short film details a specific facet of The Matrix with often unique animation styles (something The Boys series did recently when the show got animated with Diabolical).
The Animatrix is essentially split into three parts - occurring before The Matrix, we get The Second Renaissance Pts I & II and A Detective Story; happening after the original film is The Kid's Story and Final Flight of the Osiris; and occurring after the third film is Beyond. (The stories World Record, Program and Matriculate are set in an indiscernible moment, in contrast to the feature films).
Released at the height of the anime craze in the West, The Animatrix was a fun, detailed expansion of The Matrix universe (along with the game Enter the Matrix), and watching it first adds information and explanations to the first film, even if a few of its vignettes take place afterwards. Most interestingly, for all the live action quirks of The Matrix's sequels (and despite being essentially a spin-off), The Animatrix comes away as probably the only actually great feature to follow the original. While it is just one movie, each individual story will subsequently be listed chronologically in The Matrix universe.
The Second Renaissance Pts I & II
The scope of this two-part short from The Animatrix is so tremendous and grand, (and most impressively) without ever feeling like it's going to fall apart. Set in a scarily near future (around 2090), and charting humanity's reliance on machines, the two shorts center around an android being tried for murder, machines rising up, creating their own haven, taking over the planet, and subsequently The Matrix.
The Second Renaissance parts of Animatrix could honestly be placed in to a three-hour-long epic, and it would be just as valid as any of the films, which is a testament to how expertly these two shorts are done. Sit back in quiet fear at how forward-thinking these 'origin story' short films are in regard to technology... and that this movie came out almost two decades ago.
A Detective Story
As a pre-cursor to The Matrix, this follows a private eye as he hunts down the mysterious "Trinity;" in a nice touch, before the detective meets her, Trinity is believed to be male. As a great example of how varied The Animatrix is, A Detective Story is so confident in itself that it just works wonderfully well. Playing in the sandboxes of both noir and anime creates a dusty, melancholic angle to the hyper-cool tech-driven universe. With an appearance from Trinity herself (also voiced by Carrie-Anne Moss), and without feeling like mere fan service, this was our favorite of The Animatrix collection.
The Matrix
Set in 1999, the year it was released, The Matrix wonderfully positions the clunky tech of the decade against a far-out desolate future that has been stripped by sentient machines. Inside The Matrix, office blocks and skyscrapers line the streets, filled with green-hued modems and five by five cubicles. Hacker Thomas Anderson, or "Neo" (Keanu Reeves), is destined for more; he's just got to follow the rabbit trail. Recruited by Trinity, he meets Morpheus, takes the red pill, and discovers that his whole reality is a simulation created by artificial intelligence that breed and harvest humanity to power themselves.
Neo, believed to be the fabled 'One' is recruited by the resistance, fabled to free humanity from technological enslavement, and battling duplicate clones of 'Agents' (or digital manifestations of the A.I.) along the way, led by Agent Smith.
The Matrix was such a good movie that it would entirely change the face of cinema, special effects, and sci-fi going forward, becoming a massive cultural sensation.
The Kid's Story
Most similar in tone to Neo's own story in the first Matrix, The Kid skates, doesn't pay attention in school, and stays up late tapping away at blinking green font on his computer screen. The Kid's Story is probably the weakest of The Animatrix collection, but does remain a fantastic time capsule of what early 2000s life was like, and interestingly (if perhaps dangerously) suggests that one's own suicide is another way out of the Matrix and in to the real world. Keanu Reeves lends his voice to Neo at the very end.
Final Flight of the Osiris
Following another crew of survivors in the real world, one of the teams must enter The Matrix to send word to Zion of an army right above the city's head. When this opens the movie, you fear that its basic CGI suggests that The Animatrix is destined to be a lazy cash grab riding the success of The Matrix. It's fortunately not, and its animation leans in to the video game aesthetics that the series really loves about itself. It's really refreshing to see how another (similar) crew operates in contrast to Morphius' own team. Oddly, SpongeBob SquarePants' Tom Kenny features as one of said crew.
The Matrix: Reloaded
The Matrix: Reloaded takes place six months after the events of the first film, and very little has changed inside the simulated world of The Matrix, but an intriguing sense of fear has overtaken the Agents now. They refer to Neo as "The Anomaly," recognizing that he is special and can do things that the other slaves of The Matrix cannot. Word is also getting around about Neo to the liberated humans, with a fresh sense of hope that yes, he is The One.
The introduction of The Matrix: Reloaded is phenomenal, and the highway chase scene remains one of the best American action sequences of all time, in an unfortunately underwhelming follow-up. Nerdstalgic covered the highway chase scene in detail in his excellent video essay, revealing that building a whole highway set was actually more practical than hiring one:
The plot of The Matrix becomes infamously convoluted in Reloaded, but the general gist is that Neo is beginning to doubt that he is actually The One, and the human resistance is elaborated and detailed in their secretive home of Zion, as they discover that there are more people in The Matrix that are actually A.I. than they realized. Concurrently, Agent Smith discovers that he is now somewhat of a rogue agent, duplicating like a virus in the simulation.
It was a very disappointing film for critics, and audience members were frustrated by the bevy of cliffhangers leading up to the third installment. Nonetheless, it has some excellent action set pieces and design.
The Matrix Revolutions
The Matrix Revolutions picks up immediately where Reloaded ends. Neo here becomes a full-on Jesus Christ allegory, and the world of The Matrix basically turns in to an all-out video game, what with its endless battle sequences and missions. Even effects are reminiscent of movie video game adaptations (which is ironic, considering that the fourth film, Resurrections, would entirely frame its whole plot around that very premise). The CGI is increased practically tenfold, and the entire last hour is essentially a non-stop action sequence. The battle for Zion is an epic clash filled with mechanical tentacles, exploding ships, and desperate survivors, while Neo battles an army of Smiths in a rainy version of The Matrix by way of a final boss.
This was an epic end to a modern-day trilogy that is a lot of spectacle, but falters from the weight of its own mumbo-jumbo drama with a narrative that leads itself into a dead end which doesn't entirely make sense. The inclusion of lightweight additional characters and a plot that is all simultaneously too much at once makes The Matrix Revolutions a mess, but an exciting and action-packed one nevertheless.
Revolutions ends with seeming finality (albeit confusingly), so it was a surprise when a new, greatly anticipated Matrix movie was released nearly two decades later.
Beyond
In the least high-stakes of all The Animatrix stories, Beyond ultimately comes away as being the most pleasant. As a simple story of a girl who loses her cat and goes searching for it, she stumbles across an anomaly in The Matrix; said to be a haunted house by the local kids, gravity and regular rules don't apply in this glitch. Dreamy and wistful all at once, the Beyond short is a wonderful change of pace as a breather from The Matrix's usual apocalyptic movie drama and violence.
The Matrix Resurrections
While set 60 years after the events of Revolutions, The Matrix Resurrections also runs alternatively parallel — while also kind of disregarding what had come before. Now, Thomas Anderson (Reeves) has created a video game, titled The Matrix, based on his own faint memories of the experience. He is now in therapy, believing he needs help to differentiate between reality and his dreams, and keeps seeing a person who he recognizes as Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). Whether it's too far-fetched for audiences or a great excuse to bring the old gang back together was up to the viewer. Our own Julian Roman reasoned:
The fire that burned between them is reignited with rocket fuel. Some may find fault in the new characters, recasting of old favorites, and the radical shift in storyline. But no one can say that Neo and Trinity together again isn’t spectacular.
The film is divisive, but its effects are up-to-date, its acting is great (with everyone growing as actors over two decades), and the plot is fascinating, if not exactly coherent in its continuity. It may not be the masterpiece fans wanted, but it is an interesting film, and probably the conclusion to The Matrix as a whole, seeing as Keanu Reeves doesn't believe there will be another sequel. Whether that's true or not, the Matrix Resurrections is an interesting follow-up to one of the defining trilogies of the 21st century.
Program
In the most anime-inclined of the shorts on offer, two warriors battle it out inside a Matrix-framed exercise. Program sums up so much imagery from other sources, like middle-period Akira Kurosawa by way of Next Generation's Holodeck. By the time that the main character emerges from her deadly practice, having vanquished the rival samurai and gone back to the dank world of reality, the short gives off Ripley in Alien vibes. This may leave some viewers with fatigue, what with its "and it was all a dream" plot, but the short's effortless panache keeps it very entertaining. It's difficult to place Program in any chronological sequence, but it's a cool and interesting elaboration on the world of The Matrix.
World Record
World Record centers on a professional sprinter, determined to set world records, who runs so fast that he breaks free from The Matrix and is ultimately punished by the agents. As another example of The Matrix's brilliant worlds within worlds setup, it just makes this storytelling look so easy. Like a few of The Animatrix installments, the short is difficult to place in any order, but is a unique look at the agents and the possibility of glitches in the Matrix. World Record's interesting animation style and slow motion segments make it very atmospheric, and feels like a direct blueprint for Netflix's Love, Death and Robots series, which is expecting a third season and will likely continue to be very similar to The Animatrix.
Matriculated
Coming full circle in the finale to The Animatrix, Matriculated (meaning to be enrolled into something) positions a small group of survivors who attempt to sway the killing machines that are after them to join their side. Feeling more Terminator than Matrix, civilization is now gone and replaced with a bleak and empty wasteland. The humans left alive now manipulate and tempt the machines over to their way of thinking through technology that presents a shared drug trip. Mostly abstract, this is a colorful and beautifully weird stab at The Matrix ethos, setting it so far in the future that it only just resembles the world that we have seen on screen before. As such, it's probably the very last in The Matrix universe.
The Matrix Movies in Order of Release Date
- The Matrix (March 31, 1999)
- The Matrix Reloaded (May 15, 2003)
- The Animatrix (June 3, 2003)
- The Matrix Revolutions (October 27, 2003)
- The Matrix Resurrections (December 22, 2021)