i am still conflicted about seeing infernal affairs before i see the departed. do you feel it's the same principle?
I don't think it is (I know you weren't asking me, but I wanted to chime in anyway). Infernal Affiairs is its own piece of work, never designed to be adapted. Additionally, Infernal Affairs is probably about as worth watching as The Departed will be, so if you saw The Departed first, it's still seeing one movie before the other.
Ideally, The Departed will not be so similar to Infernal Affairs that it doesn't have its own thing that you can focus on. Secondly, I feel that the plot doesn't matter that much; it's more about the characters and the interesting setup.
Reading a screenplay first, however, can make for a distracting experience when you finally see the film. You'll inevitably be too interested in how the movie was put together rather than being invested in any of it. It's very interesting to read screenplays for movies you've already seen, though, and then rewatch the movie, at which point you can afford to let your mind focus on the nuts and bolts of how it went from the page to the screen, executionally (if that's a word).
The main difference, to sum up, is that a screenplay is designed to be seen as a movie more than read. However, a movie (Infernal Affairs) was designed to be seen, and the re-make should have the balls to be its own movie enough that it can complement, instead of detracting from, the first movie. You couldn't say the same thing if a movie didn't have the balls to be different from its own screenplay, as that was the point of the screenplay in the first place.
I hope that made some sense.
