Pi clears this bar easily. Sure, shooting 16mm off the hand, with oversaturated, Expressionist lighting, and some of the body horror (or did they both "rip off" Cronenberg there?) approaches homage. If one has seen Tetsuo first, there's more to appreciate.

But Pi is an excellent movie, which carries its own themes gracefully, Aronofsky made his reputation on that film and deserved to. The soundtrack was also groundbreaking.

If we were to adopt your idea of what constitutes a ripoff, the result would be more bland and defensive cinema, the kind where the script may as well have been written by the studio's attorneys.

So let's not.