You heard of the U.S.S. Lawton? Neither did the public. Out of a thousand young men on that ship I was the only survivor. They told my family she was sunk in battle but I know what I saw. It had no conscience. No reasoning. Just destroy. I spent the last 30 years trying to prove the truth of what I learned that day. This planet doesn't belong to us. Ancient species owned this Earth long before mankind; and if we keep our heads buried in the sand, they will take it back. My agency is known as Monarch. We specialize in the hunting of Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms.
„
~ Randa on the Titans while explaining his backstory.
William Randa is a major character of the 2017 action adventure film Kong: Skull Island, the second installment in Legendary's MonsterVerse franchise.
He is a senior official in the government organization Monarch and the one in charge of the 1973 Monarch expedition.
He is portrayed by John Goodman, who also played Hound in Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight, James P. Sullivan in Monsters, Inc., Fred Flintstone in the 1994 adaptation of The Flintstones, Rex in We're Back! A Dinosaur's story, Pacha in Disney's The Emperor's New Groove series and Baloo in Disney's The Jungle Book 2.
In 1943, Randa was serving aboard the U.S.S. Lawton when it was attacked by a giant monster, leaving him the only survivor. He became obsessed with proving the existence of monsters after the U.S. government covered up the incident. Monarch, a multinational research group whose goals mirrored his own, recruited him in 1952 or earlier.
In 1973, Randa and his partner Houston Brooks obtained funding from a senator to investigate an uncharted island in the Pacific. When the team arrived, they were attacked by Kong in their helicopters after they dropped seismic charges on the surface. He survived the attack, and was eventually confronted at gunpoint by Lieutenant Colonel Preston Packard about why they were on the island. Randa then revealed that he worked for the agency Monarch, and that their mission was to prove the existence of monsters on the island. He then joined up with Packard and his men as they traveled across the island.
After all the remaining members of the exploration team met up, Randa and the group headed for the boneyard, a crater full of the remains of various creatures. Randa took pictures of the bones, but they were soon found and stalked by a Skullcrawler. After the Skullcrawler left, Randa once again began taking pictures, only for his flash to malfunction. The flash managed to attract the Skullcrawler's attention and he is devoured while his camera continued to flash within its throat as it stalked the rest of the crew. However, Randa was eventually avenged when Kong defeats and kills the alpha Skullcrawler, Skull Devil, ending the threat of the Skullcrawlers and allowing Kong to become the king of Skull Island.
Personality
Randa's most prominent trait was his stubbornness to see the expedition to Skull Island go forward.
Buried deep down, however, was a much darker side to him: being the sole survivor of an attack on his vessel by an unidentified sea-dwelling Titan, Randa had let vengeance consume him and was prejudiced enough to believe that monsters like Kong possessed no conscience and that they must be exterminated. However, this changed when Randa began to see the similarities between humans and Kong.
Randa's line "monsters exist" is rather coincidentally meta in nature, as his actor John Goodman previously voiced James P. Sullivan from the Disney/Pixar animated film, Monsters Inc.
Heroes
