In 1999, The Matrix changed movies forever, and if by some fluke you haven’t seen it, be sure to savour that first watch. For fans of science fiction movies with groundbreaking action and ambitious concepts, there’s really nothing quite like it. If you want some idea, however, you can find its influence in everything from the dream world of Inception to the fight scenes in John Wick.
All that said, even if the movie’s success seems inevitable now, nobody could have imagined how fast it would grow. Just four years after the first movie, the franchise would boast two feature-length sequels, an animated anthology series called The Animatrix, and a narratively expansive computer game. Once the bullets had settled on all that, fans had to wait almost two decades for the next instalment—and even then, not a whole lot of people liked it.
With a fifth, and presumably less bizarre, sequel (from director Drew Goddard) now reportedly in the works, we’ve rounded up every film and animated short from The Matrix universe and arranged them in chronological order. If you’re watching for the first time, I’d recommend sticking to the order of release, but if you’re curious to find out where each episode slots into the Matrix universe, we’ve got you covered.
If you want to stick to release order, here’s a simplified version:
- The Matrix (1999)
- The Animatrix (all shorts) (2003)
- The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
- The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
- The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
The Second Renaissance Part I & 2 - The Animatrix (2003)
If you’re a fan of either the Matrix or basically any style of anime, you’ll want to get your hands on The Animatrix. Released in tandem with The Matrix Reloaded in the summer of 2003, it blew the world of the movies wide open with nine animated shorts, each by a different director and in a different style.
None did more to deepen the universe’s lore than the two-part The Second Renaissance by the Studio Ghibli-trained director Mahiro Maeda. The reason to start here and not the first movie is that Renaissance 1 & 2 is the earliest point in The Matrix timeline: a historical account of the rise of the machines, going all the way up to humanity’s decision to blot out the sun, and even into some early versions of the Matrix itself.
I’ve always found the mood of these shorts nicely subversive, particularly how they position humanity as its own worst enemy and cast the plight of the machines as a struggle for civil rights. If you appreciate Ghibli’s output (or harder stuff, like Akira), I can’t recommend it enough.
A Detective Story - The Animatrix (2003)
If you’re looking for a Matrix animation with a more expressive visual style, A Detective Story could be the one for you—especially if brooding, hard-boiled, black-and-white noir (think Sin City) is a style you tend to vibe with. It’s set just before the events of the first movie, following a man who tracks down Trinity online—with the help of some references from Lewis Carroll, of course–making it the perfect prequel to her fateful meeting with Neo.
A Detective Story is directed by Shinichirō Watanabe, the legendary creator of Cowboy Bebop, so if you like that iconic show, you’ll have some idea of what to expect.
The Matrix (1999)
There’s not a whole lot for us to say here except that The Matrix is a sci-fi classic, an action classic, a cinema classic, and a genuine cross-cultural phenomenon—so if you haven’t seen it by now, enjoy!
Keanu Reeves’ Neo, Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus, and Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith have been guiding audiences down the rabbit hole for nearly three decades now. Thanks to its prescient ideas, breathless fights, and awesome practical effects, I think the movie holds up perfectly. This is the source code of the Matrix Universe; the moment where it all began—it’s impossible to describe how mind-bending that all felt in 1999, you had to see it for yourself.
Kid’s Story - The Animatrix (2003)
Watanabe’s second entry in The Animatrix, A Kid’s Story, provides the origin story for Kid: the sweet but slightly annoying fanboy who is freed with Neo’s help in The Matrix, and without the use of a red pill. If you’ve always wanted to know how that happened, here’s your chance!
Played by Clayton Watson in the sequels, Kid might not be everyone’s favourite Matrix character, but Watanabe’s surreal and dreamlike short offers an intriguing introduction to the process of self-substantiation.
Final Flight of the Osiris - The Animatrix (2003)
As the only short in The Animatrix to use CG animation, appearing like a (admittedly very good) early 2000s computer-game cut-scene, Andy Jones’ Final Flight of the Osiris hasn’t aged quite as well as other episodes in the Animatrix series. The story is essentially a prologue to The Matrix Reloaded, the second live-action film in the series, and is useful in establishing the sentinels’ drilling position over Zion.
The retro feel definitely scores some nostalgia points, especially if you were gaming around that time; a fine addition to the canon, even if it’s also one of the least essential.
The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
I think The Matrix Reloaded is the best and most ambitious of the Matrix sequels—and one that any self-respecting Matrix fan presumably also enjoys.
The movie basically offers the sugar rush of wish fulfilment, allowing audiences to finally see just what Neo, as The One, is capable of. The opening scene and the highway chase rank among the best sequences in the entire series—the latter of which seemed to throw a gauntlet down for action filmmakers, inspiring everything from the vault heist in Fast Five to the motorbike chase in Mission: Impossible - Fallout. And thanks to The Architect, the Twins, and Monica Bellucci’s Persephone, the movie also boasts a whole new roster of memorable characters to round out the universe.
Beyond - The Animatrix (2003)
Beyond is a gorgeous children’s story set in some kind of Neo Tokyo-type city. The plot follows a girl named Yoko who stumbles upon a haunted house while trying to find her cat, which is exactly the kind of setup we might consider Miyazaki-like these days. So, if you’re a fan of that master, I’d recommend it.
It’s an interesting short to watch at this point in the chronology because we know that the unusual occurrences in the building (including broken objects that reassemble themselves and areas without gravity) are glitches in the Matrix, and so await the usual things to happen. But director Kōji Morimoto (who really did work on Akira) isn’t so interested in that, framing Yoko’s journey as an effective tale of lost innocence, instead.
World Record - The Animatrix (2003)
Takeshi Koike’s World Record, telling the story of a 100m sprinter at the summer Olympics, is a difficult one to place in the Matrix chronology. It almost works as a standalone idea—a suggestion of one of the many ways that a human being might wake up from The Matrix. As such, it’s the second Animatrix short to explore self-substantiation and, IMO, is one of the best entries in the franchise.
As a Matrix fan, it’s fascinating to watch him begin to realise, while running a record time, that reality might not be all it seems. There’s a sports angle here that fans of those kinds of movies will latch onto, too. The image of three agents failing to keep up with him is such a good metaphor for the possibilities of self-belief in sport; it’s amazing that the ad guys at Nike didn’t get there first.
Program - The Animatrix (2003)
Set almost entirely in a training exercise, Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Program is one of the most stylish additions to the Animatrix—and one that fans of the recent Predator: Killer of Killers (especially the second chapter) will definitely vibe with. With very little connection to the franchise’s wider narrative or other characters, it’s a similarly tricky one to place in the timeline, but most fans seem to believe it’s somewhere between the second and third movies.
The story focuses on Cis, a mysterious character who battles a samurai named Duo across the tiled rooftops of buildings in a beautifully drawn feudal Japan. In terms of story, it’s one of the lighter episodes of The Animatrix, and perhaps one of the least essential, but Kawajiri more than makes up for it with the sheer propulsive energy of his images.
The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
Before the recent movie, pretty much everyone agreed that The Matrix Revolutions was a low point in the franchise—but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth seeing. One easy way to check the quality of a Matrix movie is to ask how much time the characters spend in the “real world”—and in the case of this movie, the answer is sadly A LOT.
Released just six months after Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions mainly focuses on the battle for Zion and Neo’s death match with a now all-powerful Smith. Revolutions has its moments (who will ever forget those moments when Trinity peaked above the clouds), but it’s weirdly low on the innovative stuff that made fans fall in love with the series in the first place. Still, it closes out the original film series serviceably enough, with an epic battle generating great losses on both sides, and a monologue from the Architect that ties a bow around the Neo timeline—at least for the time being.
Matriculated - The Animatrix (2003)
Æon Flux creator Peter Chung is the mind behind Matriculated, a story of robot rehabilitation—and if you’re a fan of his work, it’s definitely one to check out. Seemingly playing out in the aftermath of Revolutions, the short follows a group of remaining rebels who are trying to reprogram machines to see if they have the capacity to relate to the human way of thinking. In order to do so, they plug them in and have them experience human emotions, all in the hope of sparking some kind of machine-learned empathy.
The story works with a neat science fiction idea and, better still, it’s told through Chung’s unique visual language.
The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
As a fan of the Wachowskis, I like to think The Matrix Resurrections has more juice than a lot of critics and fans gave it credit for—so if you’re willing to see it as a very personal and very meta statement on the franchise, there are some interesting things to recommend in it. The story takes place 60 years after the events of Revolutions, returning to Neo, who is now plugged back in, working in a gaming company, but starting to notice some imperfections in his reality.
Released 18 years after Revolutions, Lana Wachowski, in many ways, went out on her own with the film, which ended up being more of a multimillion-dollar trolling session against sequel-hungry studio bosses than a true addition to the saga—and more power to her. High on concept but unusually uninspired in its action sequences, this is one I would recommend only to the completists and the curious.
