Tree of Life: It Burns in My Mind (not in a good way)

For the life of me, I cannot understand Tree of Life.  Now, I understand why Brad Pitt and Sean Penn would want to be in a Terrence Mallick movie.  I mean the director is well respected, did amazing work on Badlands, The Thin Red Line and Days of Heaven.  (I seem to recall Sean Penn might have been in The Thin Red Line -  but I want to remember not check IMDB - so I might be wrong).
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Terrence's work is both "Art" and successful ("The New World" an exception in the successful category, but it was a beautiful failure).  So I get the why of  participating.
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But success has gone to poor goofy Terrence's screwed up head.  After Harvard and Oxford, he taught philosophy at MIT.  Let me say, anyone going to see Tree of Life expecting great Philosophy would be better off taking a toke and looking at the moon for an hour (after having it prescribed for anxiety, of course).
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About half way through the movie (which is to say - about hour 6) we break away from the voice over grief from the dead brother (accompanied by shots of mom playing with the boys, Brad being a stern father, and Sean Penn wandering from the Great Salt Lake Desert, over lava rock in Iceland, to Monument Valley) - we go from this "grief" to the big bang.
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Really - the big bang.  The big bang as heartbeat.  Then to protozoa, jellyfish and finally a vicious Velociraptor - with a heart of gold IN THE SAME RIVER that the dead brother used to swim in!  The circle of life - tada!
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Ha, Scooter says. And the cute blond brother dies at 19.  We see no shots of what the cute blond brother looked like at 18.  And don't get Ed started on Brother 3, who's story was obviously edited out - and will be in the 12 hour director's cut.
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By the way, you did  read that right.  In the middle of the story, there is a fairly lengthy scene of a vicious Velociraptor with a heart of gold.  SWEAR!