Is this film serious? Or am I stupid?

Rating: 5/10 (2 April 2020)

The film is beautiful, the aesthetics and cinematography is right up my alley, and Brad Pitt's performance is, as usual, underrated as hell.
But I was left feeling like I'm stupid.
I could not for the life of me take this movie or any of the characters seriously. By the end I ended up with my own theory, and that is the boy we see at the start, the end, and in James' dreams being traumatized by the shooting and making up stories in his head of what happened and why it happened in order to cope. What really gave me this idea is a bunch of different things. One is a scene where James' character is in some kind of hospital bed, surrounded by the scientists congratulating him, and the female scientist covers him up with a child's blanket. Throughout the story I also thought that Dr. Railly is actually his mother, and the man that gets shot in the vision is his father, whose face we never see, and I thought the woman and the man in the vision looked very 70s...
Basically, what I am saying is that I think James really is crazy and institutionalized, and that the film is about him beginning to realize that he is insane. The virus itself is an infection of the mind. The surface is the conscious mind/awareness, and him "time-traveling" is really him coming into lucidity about reality. Another clue is about how he begins to question his sanity the more time he spends in "the past"...
I mean. Listen. IF this film is not at all serious, and is actually about madness or a schizophrenic man's perspective of reality, then it is genius. But if this is some convoluted story about actual time-time travel and an actual virus, then I'm way over my head. If this is ALL happening in James' head, then I would give it 7/8 stars, but my interpretation seems unpopular and most reviewers take this film seriously for some reason... If this film is meant to be taken seriously then I'd give it 2 stars.
So I'll settle on 5 for now. I need more evidence to support my theory that the story is bogus and James is a mentally crazy person who is "curing" his mental illness by the process of rationalizing childhood trauma.