Copycat script unseemly in a film with such pretensions

Rating: Null/10 (26 February 2007)

I saw Infernal Affairs just two weeks before I saw The Departed. I can't understand how a film (and its director and screenwriter) that so completely mimics the Chinese original, scene for scene, with bits at the beginning from the old Boston Globe series on Whitey Bulger's predatory treatment of young Southie girls and their families, has received so much praise, let alone Oscars for scriptwriting and direction, which would seem to require some substantial originality and creativity. The acting and technical aspects of the film, e.g., cinematography, were fine, but the copycat nature of the script, taken from a fine foreign film that was barely out of production itself, left me feeling like someone had cheated.
Perhaps I am missing something, but I did not feel any such disappointment in the American remake of the Seven Samurai, i.e., The Magnificent Seven, because I felt that the scriptwriter and director in the second of that pair, while keeping the general plot outline, made many more substantive changes in the story.