Lightsabers can block blaster bolts because the Jedi/Sith use precognitive vision to know where the bolt is going to be.
Surely you're the last person left who buys into that.
So if you fired double aught from a Winchester 12-gage at a Jedi he would... magically block each and every ball because he could swing his lightsaber magically fast - unless he was in combat against some random dude who could dodge the blade despite a diet of space corn.
Firing three simultaneous blaster bolts is as trivial as duct-taping three blasters together and wiring their triggers in parallel. Anybody could do it in five minutes and it would make precognition irrelevant. That's just simple physics.
There isn't any way to make a narrow, hand-operated tool act as a reliable defense against multiple projectiles, much less fragmentation weapons. Toss a WW-I hand-grenade near a Jedi and just what is he going to block?
That's why I said the whole concept falls apart.
It would've been trivial to write in a technological edge for them, such as personal shield devices whose design was a state secret, but instead Lucas tried to give them a mystical power, which also could've worked if it powered a mystical shield device. But no, he gave us the utterly ridiculous idea of a sword that cut down bullets - all bullets - from anywhere.
Congratulations, you've revealed Star Wars as stupid.
I doubt there's a single example of science fiction (perhaps fiction period) in the world that isn't in some way logically inconsistent, even stupid in some respect. Even something hailed to be as hard as
Gattaca reveals dire flaws on close inspection. Supposedly tightly-plotted
Babylon 5 has at least a dozen instances that require people to be idiots in order for the story to work as intended. And, blasphemy of blasphemies,
Childhood's End features a version of evolution that makes no sense. These are all works meant to be taken more seriously than Star Wars--and the rule of cool is probably to be construed more liberally in a cartoon world such as Lucas'.
That said, I like pointing out stupid stuff too, so here's another: AT-ATs are ludicrous. They wouldn't work, and even if they did, they'd be much less effective than tanks. And the Death Star is physically retarded; it's only easy to suspend disbelief about the unbinding of whole planets because it's at a level completely outside normal human experience. No one would buy the mathematically equivalent relationship of a guy running on a treadmill and somehow lighting all of North America.
But both are pretty cool.
Anyway, I'm not really sure I agree with the OP that the increased automation of the films production necessarily had to lead to the Star Wars Age of Suck. I'll grant, the way the actors were directed (i.e.,
not directed) against the bluescreens is probably the central and irreparable flaw in the film. But bluescreening is nothing new and hundreds of films have managed to get competent, even great performances, out of their actors despite the lack of complete physical sets to anchor them to the fictional world's false reality. Even "complete" physical sets are very often obviously unreal when seen from the actor's point of view. Ultimately, I blame it less on the technique than on people who had no idea, or had forgotten, how to make a movie
at all.
That and three of the shittiest scripts ever written.
I even sort of want to blame the actors, and wonder if that's fair--I find it hard to believe that people like MacGregor and Portman would act in such a stiff, unnatural way unless actually ordered to do so. I mean, these people must be somewhat capable of directing themselves, right?
